What it means to stay anchored when everything is falling apart

The first time I understood what it means to stay anchored when everything is falling apart, I was not in a newsroom. I was in Ukraine.

We had been told there was shelling in a village not far from us. As we sped towards it, the traffic was coming the opposite way – cars swerving, people fleeing, the kind of movement that tells you something is very wrong.

Our taxi driver didn’t want to go any further. He stopped just long enough for the cameraman and me to grab our bulletproof jackets and helmets from the boot before speeding away.

My hands were shaking as I tried to get the jacket on. I couldn’t fasten it quickly enough. My heart was pounding so hard it felt louder than everything else.

There were sirens, but they didn’t sound the way you’d expect. The noise of the shelling and the screaming and the alarms seemed to blur together, as if it was all happening behind a thin layer. Close, but distant at the same time. Reality had shifted, just slightly, and everything felt unfamiliar.

People were running towards a makeshift shelter, shouting at us to come with them. Part of me wanted to follow. To go underground. To be safe.

And then something in me didn’t.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet, steady knowing.

The cameraman picked up the camera and we ran towards where the shells were landing.

By the time we reached the scene, everything had narrowed. The chaos, the noise – it all fell away, and what remained was what was directly in front of us.

An old man crouched over a woman’s body in the street.

There was blood everywhere. It had pooled next to her and was slowly running into the gutter. Her shopping bags were scattered – things she had just bought, now lying everywhere.

He must have been walking just ahead of her when it happened. He was crying out her name, over and over again.

I have heard grief before. But this was something else. It was raw, almost animal, as if something had been torn out of him. Not controlled, not contained. Just sound – deep, unbearable sound – coming from somewhere beyond language.

And around him, the shelling continued. But he didn’t move. He didn’t run. He didn’t seem to register the danger at all.

In that moment, it was as if everything else had fallen away – the missiles, the noise, the risk. All that existed for him was her. And he was completely held there.

I remember standing close to him, fully aware of the danger and yet also unable to move. It wasn’t that I felt safe – I didn’t. But something about the way he was with her made everything else feel irrelevant. For a moment, my fear fell away, and all that remained was the weight of what I was witnessing.

I was reminded of what I’ve seen time and again – when everything external disappears – when the ground shifts, when nothing feels stable – something else takes over. Not fear. Not panic. But something far more anchored. Love, in his case.

Over the years working in warzones I had assumed that survival was about knowing when to run, when to take cover, when to get out. But standing there, I realised that  strength is not always about moving away from danger. Sometimes, it is about knowing exactly what matters – and being unable, or unwilling, to leave it.

The fear is always there. The instinct to run is real.

And yet, in the moments that matter most, people don’t always move away. They stay. Not because it’s safe, but because something else holds them there.

I have seen it in other places too.

In Algeria, after an earthquake, I met a family whose home had collapsed, taking with it their 17-year-old daughter, Yasmine. They were living on the pavement opposite where their apartment building had once stood, still wearing the clothes they’d been rescued in. The father, Krimo, begged the South African search and rescue team I was accompanying to find something of his daughter. “Please,” he pleaded, “we are Muslim. It is important for us to have something to bury. Even a fingernail, a strand of hair, a piece of clothing.”

They had nothing left. And yet, when we arrived, they insisted on feeding us – offering what little their neighbours had brought them, pressing it into our hands with quiet insistence, as if giving something was the only way to steady themselves in the aftermath of loss.

Another time, in Georgia, a woman who had been displaced from her home and was living in a classroom, took a ring off her finger and gave it to me as a gift. Even though she was a refugee living on handouts, she insisted I take it as a thank-you for telling her story.

War destroys buildings. It destroys lives. It strips people of everything familiar.

But it does not always destroy what makes us human.

In fact, sometimes it reveals it more clearly.

We like to think strength looks a certain way – composed, controlled, decisive.

But in the places I have worked, strength often looks very different.

It looks like someone who has lost everything, and yet is completely anchored in what remains.

Most of us will never find ourselves in a war zone. But we all know what it feels like when the ground below us shifts – when something ends, when something breaks, when the world we thought we understood no longer holds.

In those moments, our instinct is often to move away. To escape the discomfort, to quiet the feeling, to regain control as quickly as possible.

But there is another way of responding. To stay. To recognise what is actually in front of one, rather than what we wish were there.

Often, we already know when something isn’t right – in a relationship, in a decision, in the quiet moments we try to override. Not because it’s obvious, but because something in us has already registered it. We just don’t always stay with it long enough to listen.

The question is whether we are willing to stay.

And maybe that is where strength begins – not in controlling what is happening around us, but in being anchored to what we already know to be true. Even when it would be easier to look away. Even when every instinct tells you to run.

By Paula Slier – International Speaker