Around the holidays and new year, it’s natural to evaluate and appreciate our most important relationships. When we think of these relationships, many immediately come to mind: family, friends, fun coworkers, the barista that knows your name. You might even include something culturally specific, like your relationship with God, your ancestors, or the future. But there’s one relationship that determines them all: your relationship to reality.

Every relationship that you have—including the culturally specific ones—exist within your relationship to reality. And that brings up a thorny question that most of us don’t like to think about: when it all gets quiet, do I think that beauty or brutality is around the next temporal corner? When you stop for a moment in traffic and the chatter in your head slowly loses its edge and all you’re left with is the faraway rumblings of other cars outside your window, does your brain appreciate the way the light hits the steering wheel? The way the rumbles of the engines harmonize? The way the seat feels against your back? Or do you worry about how you’ll be late, how you have to pay that bill, how the world doesn’t understand X or Y?

Your relationship with reality is the relationship that determines all others. Wouldn’t it be more effective to focus on your appreciation of the moment instead of trying to improve your appreciation of the moments inside that moment? Desmond Tutu said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” Work upstream of the problem. Don’t work on the strained relationship with your sister before you work on your relationship to the reality in which your sister resides.

How do you know if you’re creating a better relationship with reality? Like most things on this blog, it starts with presence. Step out of your thoughts for a minute by looking deeply at the details woven into your shoelace. What kind of pattern holds all those threads together? When you deeply inspect a shard of reality, thoughts disappear. Suddenly, your frustrations about last night’s dinner evaporate and you’re overwhelmed with a stunning moment here and now. Whenever I return to being mindful through breath or detail, I’ve frequently thought to myself, “How long has this been here?” The answer is, of course, forever.

Once you experience swimming in the visual details of something in your environment, you now have a jumping off point from which you can meter the rest of your experiences in reality. Next time you hit traffic, you can let the moment be as it is instead of fighting to change it. The next time your sister makes an irritating comment, you can let the words wash over you as they are, without the history behind them. Taking reality at face value is a key part of improving your relationship with it. Be objective with reality. Release the story—”My sister said I don’t work hard” instead of “My sister said I don’t work hard but she’s too selfish too see how well I’m doing at work”—and the story will release you. Give yourself over to presence and every relationship you have will improve.

This Christmas and new year, give yourself the gift of improving your relationship with reality. Give yourself the gift of presence. It will make everything brighter, make everything new, and it just might reveal the story you’ve been living this whole time.