Alan Watts:
“You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.
So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this.
Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control, and what might happen.
Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth…and lack a certain kind of self-confidence. And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self-confidence you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.
You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.
Then through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence, and through confidence, you will be able to trust your own intuition. But this is the middle way,
of knowing it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not, whether you decide you can’t make a mistake
or whether you don’t decide it, it is true anyway, that you are like cloud and water.
And through that realization, without overcompensating in the other direction,
you will come to the point of where you begin to be on good terms with your own being and to be able to trust your own brain.”