You Know What To Do

A well-known Buddhist teacher recently appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to talk about the importance of embracing uncertainty. It started well enough, with the teacher saying how meditation can loosen our attachment to rigid views. True. But it soon slid into a common Western misunderstanding: that doubt is inherently virtuous, and that the Buddha taught us to simply sit with doubt rather than respond to it. At one point, the teacher even suggested that non-reactivity is what the Buddha meant by nirvana.

The Buddha said no such thing. For him, doubt wasn't something to praise, but to work through and overcome. More importantly, there are ethical and spiritual moments when what is needed is NOT more openness, but decisive clarity and action. If someone tells me I’m hurting them, replying with “it’s complicated” or “I need to sit with my uncertainty” is avoidance, not wisdom. Appeals to uncertainty are often used to enable injustice, oppression, and genocide.

Not everything in life is unclear. In my coaching practice, I’m struck by how often people already know what they need to do. They usually say it in the first five minutes of a session. They need to leave a soulless job, set boundaries with a disrespectful parent, end a relationship that's turned cruel. The rest of the session is simply about working through the fears and doubts that make acting on the truth so hard.

Ajaan Fuang once said, “If you doubt everything, don’t doubt that you’re breathing.” He wasn’t talking about the air in your lungs. He meant that wisdom comes from attending to the small, simple movements of discernment that we already know how to do.

You know the difference between a tense breath and one that soothes. You know when your words help and when they wound. You know when you’re acting from care or hiding behind hesitation. This is not the certainty of dogma, but the clarity of lived experience.

Don’t hide behind uncertainty. Do what, deep down, you already know is needed, however small. You don’t have to know everything. Just act on the something you already do.

Dorothea Lange, "Woman in a moving car, looking out the window, Berkeley, California" (1956)