Sunscreen, Cyclones, and the Moon: On Leading When Reality Stops Making Sense

I'm writing this on a Saturday from the Gold Coast, slightly sunburned, school holidays in full swing.

While I was calculating the optimal queue strategy for a rollercoaster this week, my phone was pinging with cyclone alerts from Hawke's Bay. Supermarket shelves stripped of bread, water, and — inevitably — toilet paper. Friends hunkering down. Petrol prices spiking. The Iran-Israel situation still grinding on in the background, the kind of news that sits heavy even when you're not actively reading it.

And then, somewhere over the Pacific, a spacecraft that had just orbited the moon splashed down into the ocean.

I watched the footage on my phone while buying my kids a $22 burger in a Gold Coast food court, and felt genuinely unhinged.

Not in a breakdown way. In a this is just Saturday now kind of way.

Here's what I've come to think that feeling actually is.

Modern leadership — whether you run a business, a farm, a trust, or a household — requires you to hold multiple completely incompatible realities at the same time. Not just hold them. Operate inside them. Make decent decisions across all of them. Simultaneously.

There's the immediate reality: sunscreen logistics, the school holiday schedule, the invoice that needs to go out Friday.

There's the urgent reality: the cyclone bearing down, the interest rate announcement, the client whose cashflow is precarious, the compliance deadline you cannot miss.

And then there's the epochal reality: the things so large and slow they barely register until suddenly they do — climate, geopolitics, AI, a spacecraft returning from the moon.

Most business thinking tells you to focus. Pick your timeframe. Manage what you can control. And yes — that's right. But it's also incomplete.

Because the real skill isn't narrowing your attention. It's developing the capacity to hold the dissonance without it breaking your judgment.

The cyclone is real. The rollercoaster is also real.

Some of the best decisions I've seen clients make were made during chaos. Not despite it — almost because of it. Chaos strips away the comfort of assuming tomorrow will look like yesterday. It forces a kind of clarity.

And some of the worst decisions I've seen were made by people who couldn't tolerate the dissonance — who either catastrophised everything and froze, or compartmentalised so hard they missed the signals that mattered.

The people who navigate it well don't pretend the contradictions away. They develop a kind of peripheral vision — keeping the moon in one eye and the supermarket queue in the other, and being honest about which one needs their hands right now.

The Artemis question I keep sitting with:

Humanity just sent people around the moon. We actually did that. And we also can't quite manage to keep bread on the shelves before a storm.

I don't think that's a contradiction. I think that's exactly what we are — capable of extraordinary things and deeply, stubbornly human at the same time.

Your business is the same. It can have a twenty-year vision and still have a terrible week. It can be building something genuinely meaningful and still need to deal with the mundane and the frightening simultaneously.

That's not failure. That's not weakness. That's just the actual texture of running anything.

So if you're feeling slightly unhinged with reality right now — you're probably paying attention.

The goal isn't to feel less. It's to stay functional inside the feeling. To be the person in the room who can name what's happening, hold the complexity, and still make the next right call.

Buy the kids a burger. Check on your people back home. Watch the spacecraft land.

And keep going.

Sarah Walker is a Chartered Accountant at Epplett & Co, providing accounting, tax, and business advisory services to clients across the Hawke's Bay region.