The Habit of Reality

Amsterdam was the next stop. I had been looking forward to it. Canals like veins of glass. Bridges lined with bikes. Tulips in every color. This was a city I’d always wanted to see - and now I was here, not as a tourist with a guidebook, but carrying our story into one of Europe’s most storied cities. But Amsterdam greeted me in its own way. The Bikes Even before I arrived, I had a plan. I was determined to make it to the Banksy Museum before it closed on my first day.

But my plane was delayed, and by the time I reached the city, the clock in my head was already ticking. I climbed into a cab from the station - and within minutes, it began. A swarm of bicycles. Dozens of them. Handlebars wobbling, bells clattering, weaving across the street like a migrating herd that refused to yield. The cab slowed. Then slower. Until we were practically crawling. I gripped the seat in front of me, irritation rising in my chest. Come on. I’m already late. The driver didn’t flinch. His hands rested loosely on the wheel, his eyes calm - as if this were the most natural rhythm in the world.

The driver told me, “Amsterdam has more bikes than people - 850,000 bikes for 800,000 residents.” I politely smiled, then turned to my watch and thought. I’m going to be late. Why can’t they ride faster? Why can’t we pass them? One rider swerved past the hood, balancing a bouquet of tulips on his handlebars, petals bouncing with every bump. Another pedaled with a child strapped to the front, tiny arms outstretched like wings. Eventually the street cleared, and the cab carried on. But the joy of arrival was gone - stolen by a few slow minutes and my own resistance to them.

The Banksy Museum Later that day, I set out to see the Banksy Museum. It was at the top of my Amsterdam list - a collection of Banksy’s most iconic street art, raw and brilliant. By the time I reached the museum, anticipation was high. Posters of Banksy’s work covered the outer walls - Girl with Balloon, Flower Thrower, Rage. The images I’d only ever seen online now within reach. Then I saw it. A single sheet of paper taped to the door: Closed for the holiday. I stopped on the sidewalk, staring at the sign.

All that buildup. All that excitement. Gone in a second. My stomach sank. My brain flipped the switch: Of course. First the bikes. Now this. The world really doesn’t want me to enjoy Amsterdam. I muttered under my breath, “Seriously? Today of all days?” The frustration started building - that familiar tightness in my chest. So I caught it. Time to use the Reset to Balance Routine. Reset to Balance Routine 1. Notice the Trigger. Today didn’t go as i wanted it to in my my 2. Name the Trigger. I’m fighting reality 3. Take an Intentional Breath to Release.

The moment is as it is 4. Return to Balance. I took one more breath and exhaled fully - long, slow, intentional. The irritation still flickered, but the storm had passed. Then something unexpected happened. The city started to come back into focus. The walk was postcard-perfect. Bridges arched over narrow canals. Market stalls spilled tulips in every color - red, yellow, purple, white - their scent sweet against the cold air. I slowed my pace. I’d read that tulips once sparked the world’s first economic bubble - in the 1600s, a single bulb could sell for the price of a house.

Entire fortunes made and lost over flowers. Now, centuries later, here I was, buying a small bunch for a few euros, watching tourists wobble away with them on rented bikes. The absurdity made me grin. And the irony wasn’t lost on me - tulips had once represented obsession, and now they reminded me of balance. Sometimes, what’s closed isn’t a punishment. It’s an invitation to notice what’s still open. Reality, Just as It Is And that’s when I caught myself. The world wasn’t conspiring against me. Bikes were just being bikes. A museum was just closed.

Nothing personal. Nothing targeted. Just life doing what life does. The fight wasn’t with reality. The fight was with the picture in my head of how I thought reality should be. I turned from the locked door and started walking. The canals stretched out, water glinting under the winter lights. Cafés spilled soft yellow light onto cobblestones. The air smelled faintly of wood smoke and rain. I slowed down. I let the city move at its own pace. The bikes, the lights, the quiet hum of life unfolding exactly as it always had. And something shifted.

I remembered something I once heard Michael Singer say in a workshop. He explained that this very moment - the one you’re experiencing right now - is the result of 13.8 billion years of creation, expansion, and alignment. Every star that exploded, every atom that fused, every gravitational pull and cosmic coincidence had to unfold in perfect sequence for this second to exist exactly as it does. It was one of those statements that rearranges how you see everything. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thirteen-point-eight billion years ago, everything that exists - every atom, every ounce of matter, every possibility - was compressed into a single point of infinite density.

Then, in an instant: boom. The universe didn’t explode in space; it exploded into existence, creating space itself. From that white-hot plasma came the first subatomic particles - protons, neutrons, and electrons. They collided, cooled, and fused to form the first atoms. Gravity gathered those atoms together until, deep inside the pressure of collapse, fusion began. A star was born. Stars burned, expanded, and died in spectacular explosions that scattered the heavy elements across the cosmos. Each death seeded the next creation. Each collapse made room for something new. Somewhere in that endless rhythm of birth and destruction, one particular sequence of stars produced the exact mix of elements required to form a small blue planet orbiting an ordinary sun.

Four-and-a-half billion years later, your parents shared a bottle of wine. Nine months after that, you were born. And years later, somehow, the story of all that stardust converged into this exact moment - standing in Amsterdam, under winter lights, beside a locked museum door. Why did I need to know all that? Because life is a miracle that took 13.8 billion years of exploding stars and gravity to create. Every breath, every sound, every reflection on the canal surface - all of it is the culmination of 13.8 billion years of perfect, unbroken sequence.

Every atom, every star, every neutron star had to be just big enough to explode, just hot enough to fuse, just stable enough to exist - for this precise second to arrive. How could I possibly fight a moment that took the entire universe to make? I smiled. The absurdity of resisting reality suddenly felt clear. The only sane response was to experience it - fully, gratefully - as the gift it already was. The Return The next morning, I came back to Banksy. This time, the doors were open. Inside, the walls pulsed with rebellion.

Girl with Balloon stared back at me - innocence reaching for hope. Flower Thrower leapt from the wall - a masked figure hurling not a bomb but a bouquet. Banksy’s work was defiance made beautiful. And right next door: the Van Gogh Museum. If Banksy was graffiti with a heartbeat, Van Gogh was paint with a soul. His work hung like time captured in color. Yellows that burned like fire. Blues that hummed like midnight. Brushstrokes so thick they felt alive, fingerprints pressed into eternity. Sunflowers stood proud in their familiar blaze of yellow - the painting that once made critics wonder if color could scream.

And then Starry Night - galaxies swirling across canvas, madness and wonder in motion. The guide mentioned Van Gogh had painted more than 900 works in just over a decade, yet sold only one in his lifetime. One. A genius who poured eternity into his art but never lived to see it appreciated. Walking those halls, I felt the contrast: Banksy and Van Gogh - two artists separated by centuries but bound by the same truth. One fought reality head-on; the other surrendered to it. Banksy rebelled against the world that was. Van Gogh revealed the world as it was.

One forced the mirror. The other painted the reflection. And standing between them, I realized that was the balance I was learning to practice - to accept the moment in front of me while still creating the future I believed could exist. You don’t have to fight reality to change it. You just have to stop wasting energy resisting what already is, and start investing that energy into what could be. A Step in the Right Direction After the museums, I set up my laptop at a café by the canal - the kind with old wooden tables, the scent of espresso and rain in the air, and bikes gliding past every few seconds.

Halfway through catching up on messages, an update from David appeared. “Bali was amazing. I’m confident that SC Johnson’s chairman, Fisk Johnson will want us to be there. He’s a fifth-generation family chairman and a lifelong scuba diver. So much potential there.” I leaned back, smiling. Exactly the update I needed. Then I scrolled to the other message I’d been waiting for - the one that would determine if all our digital systems were finally ready to come to life. There it was: Your app has been submitted to the App Store. Status: Waiting for review.

I stared at the words for a long moment. For a second, I felt that old impulse - the urge to will it to happen right now, to force the outcome. Then I smiled. It is as it is. I closed the laptop and went back to enjoying my coffee. The Insanity of Fighting Reality Buddha taught that suffering comes from attachment - from craving, from insisting that reality should be different than it is. That had been me in Amsterdam. I wasn’t suffering because of bikes or closed doors. I was suffering because I had written a script for how the day should go, and reality refused to follow it.

When you zoom out, it feels ridiculous. But zoom in, and it’s what we all do - fighting reality moment by moment until the fight itself exhausts us. Reality doesn’t need us to approve of it. It just needs us to notice it. The goal isn’t to let life simply happen; it’s to let this moment happen exactly as it is while using everything within your control to guide the future you want to create. That’s the balance - accepting what’s in front of you while shaping what’s ahead. The Questions of Reality By the third evening, the rhythm of the Ocean Film Tour’s Q & A sessions became familiar.

Lights dimmed. Credits rolled. Applause rose. Then I stepped forward, microphone in hand. A woman in the second row raised her hand. “If corporations created this mess, how can you trust them to fix it?” I nodded. “That’s a fair question. Some corporations were the problem. Some still are. But not all will be. The most surprising hope I’ve seen isn’t from perfect companies - it’s from imperfect ones with people inside them choosing to create change from within.” I looked around the room. “You can’t control the moment,” I said, softer now. “You can only control how you respond to it.

But the future - the future absolutely belongs to you. “That’s what I’m seeing fromq the changemakers inside the biggest corporations we work with. They don’t waste energy fighting the present. They invest it in building the future they believe in. “True changemakers embrace the reality in front of them while working relentlessly to create what comes next. They don’t wait for permission. They act. They build. They move.” “Focus your energy on the future - because you can make it happen.” The room went still. Then came the applause - slow, steady, and real.

As the crowd began to leave, I stayed on stage for a moment longer, watching them drift toward the exits. Outside, the familiar sound of bikes on cobblestone echoed through the night, and the scent of tulips hung faintly in the cold air. Reality hadn’t been my enemy. Resistance had. And for the first time, I understood what it meant to let go of one - without giving up on the other. Reflections Reality is never the enemy. Resistance is. The Habit of Reality is the discipline of releasing the script in your head while still writing the next one you believe in.

Every delay, every closed door, every wrong turn - they aren’t punishments. They’re reminders. Let the moment in front of you be what it is. And while you’re in it, do everything within your control to guide the future you want to create. That balance - acceptance with intention - is where peace and progress meet. If it took 13.8 billion years of stardust and supernovas to align this exact moment, how could we waste it fighting what already exists? Accept the moment as it is. Shape the future as it could be.