There is a way of walking that is also a way of listening. Yesterday, turning off 100th with the Kybalion in my ears—Rhythm, Becoming, the old law that says everything moves in and out like breath—I felt that listening rise from sound to sight, from thought to step. The street was a metronome. A white pickup slipped past my bumper and claimed the curb as if appointed; a woman stepped out with the ease of someone arriving precisely on time. I eased my truck into park, and the day eased me into attention.
I moved toward the bank and noticed that I was moving toward the bank—as if the noticing were the real event and the errand only its shadow. Heel, then toe. Contact, then release. The sidewalk carried a faint percussion beneath the shoes of a stranger. On the flowerpot by the doors sat a man whose eyes struck mine like a bell. “Three dollars for a shower,” he chimed, his voice neither begging nor bargaining but naming a simple physics: cause, effect; need, response; the pendulum asking to be met at its farthest arc.
At the ATM a mother balanced a child on her hip, two more corralled beneath the screen’s unblinking stare. “It’s not working,” she murmured, and the sentence fell like a small stone in a pond. Three heads turned, three ripples widened—frustration, fatigue, then resolve: we’ll go inside. I reached the door a heartbeat before her. Held it. She gathered her small constellation and passed through with a smile that said both thank you and I am still learning to trust the world. Another woman followed; another thread in the loom: smile, breath, thank you. Behind them, a man trying to exit met the same open door with no expression at all. He slipped past like weather—neither rude nor kind, simply a low-pressure system moving through. Rhythm remembers to include what we do not prefer.
It occurred to me—no, it arrived in me—that reality is born one second at a time, and that we are midwives to it’s birth, never neutral. The Kybalion says everything flows out and in; that the pendulum-swing is manifest in all things. Yesterday, I felt the clockwork of that sentence loosen into something living. The swing was not only in the street’s busyness, not only in smiles given and smiles withheld. It was in my breath meeting the cool air and returning warmed. It was in the give of the door as I pulled and the soft propulsion of it closing behind each person I let through. It was in the mother’s anxious face settling, then lifting again when the teller’s window—like a small mercy—opened.
Presence is not a mood; it is a method. It is how consciousness presses its seal into the wax of the moment. When I say I felt connected to everyone entering and leaving the bank, I do not mean I loved them in a sentimental way. I mean something plainer and more exact: that in those few minutes the porous boundary between “me” and “not-me” thinned to a membrane of attention. The Principle of Correspondence rose like a tide—as within, so without—and I noticed that the quiet I kept inside drew out a quiet in the room, even as strollers squeaked and receipts printed and coins chattered in the metal mouth of a counting tray. The Principle of Mentalism hummed too: the world appearing as thought takes shape, not by wishful magic but by the ordinary alchemy of orientation. Attend with reverence, and the day will answer in kind; attend with suspicion, and it will offer you proof.
But Rhythm is the teacher of humility: the man on the flowerpot, the man without a smile, the mother’s momentary fray of nerves. The pendulum does not ask whether we’re ready. It moves. Our task is not to arrest the swing but to ride it without becoming its passenger. In that sense, opening the door was not only courtesy; it was a concrete way to meet the oscillation and steady it. Small acts, rightly placed, are flywheels: they do not stop time, but they smooth it.
When the woman with the children finished at the teller, she turned back toward the door—the same door I had held—and smiled again. Thank you, she mouthed, once more, as if we were completing a figure in a dance. There was nothing heroic about it; there was only the recognition that a rhythm completed asks to be acknowledged. Somewhere a white pickup truck idled down 102nd. Somewhere a shower cost exactly three dollars. Somewhere an infant drifted back to sleep on a mother’s shoulder because a stranger made space on a threshold.
I am tempted, when I write about this, to enlarge it into a parable. Perhaps it is one. But what the episode taught me refuses ornament. It says: Notice the birth of reality. It says: The world is not a fixed theater where actors recite scripts—it is a stage being built as each line is spoken. It says: Hold the door, and you change something no article can measure. The Kybalion names this in the abstract; the curb names it in the concrete.
We do things for a reason, yes—but often the reason is not the one our plans propose. I went to the bank to move numbers from one place to another. I left with a different account balanced: the ledger of attention. I felt wealthy—richer, perhaps, because I was witnessing—witnessing reality’s unfoldment—for a brief interval I was not merely in time but with it, consenting to be carried and to contribute. There is a privilege to being alive that we rarely cash, because we rarely stand still long enough to recognize that existence is making an offer every instant: Participate—let it flow.
Not every passerby will smile when you hold the door. Not every plea will fit into your pocket. Not every machine will work on the first try. And yet the scene remains sacred, because what hallows it is not universal gratitude or perfect outcomes but the practice of presence, which is gratitude’s root and outcome’s teacher. Presence sharpens the senses without hardening the heart. It grants the steadiness to watch the pendulum and the freedom to step in rhythm with it, not as a servant of swing but as its counterpoint.
When I write The Bank Scene, I do not mean I watched something remarkable happen. I mean I watched the ordinary reveal its architecture. Comings and goings, asks and answers, entrances and exits—the hinge between them is a human hand on a door. The hinge within them is a human will choosing to be awake.
On days when the street offers only empty parking and the world seems inclined to occupy your space, remember that Rhythm is not against you; it is simply larger than you. Become a still point that moves. Let the swing become your teacher. And if the bell of another’s need rings—“three dollars for a shower”—listen for the note that follows: your part in the chord.
What changed in me outside that bank was not belief but bearing. I walked in aware that reality was being born with every step. I walked out with the conviction that this birth is our work to midwife, together, a second at a time. And like all births, it is messy and glorious, costly and given, ordinary and miraculous. We do it for a reason, yes: because we are alive. And to be alive is the unearned permission to participate—eyes open, hands gentle, heart steady—in the making of the day.
