What To Do when You Don’t Know What to Do

The alarm goes off and you immediately hit the snooze. Not because you need more sleep, in fact you haven’t been asleep for awhile now. Your thoughts become a dizzying spin of questions without answers. You couldn’t stop thinking if you wanted to.

How will you make it through this day?
How will this ever turn out okay?
How can you keep moving on?
What do you do now?

Your heart is full of questions, but your head is void of answers.

photo by Andy Wilson

Better stories lead to these kinds of days. Days without hope. Days when all seems lost. Days when you question the point of your efforts. Days when you wonder why you keep trying. Days when starting seems like the worst idea you ever had.

At some point, everyone feels this sense of impossibility. Emotions take over. Fear and dread rule the day.

And, unfortunately, it is at this point that too many quit.

In his Modern Library top 100 novel, The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler gives us an idea of how to discover what to do next.

“If people who are in a little difficulty will only do the first reasonable thing they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step easier to both see and take.”

There are two steps.

1. Identify the first reasonable thing.

It doesn’t have to be the solution to the problem. It doesn’t have to be what anybody else would do. It doesn’t even have to work. All you need to do is to see something reasonable. Something that makes sense. Something that isn’t clearly the wrong answer.

And of course to see something, you have to have your eyes open. You have to keep looking. Even when your vision is blurred and when the path isn’t clear.

Don’t stop.

2. Do this reasonable thing.

Even when it seems pointless, even when it seems impossible, you still need to do. Nothing good ever happens through inactivity. Nothing happens by staying put.

Your bias should always lean towards activity, even if you aren’t sure it is the right thing to do. You need to begin even when you don’t have the answers. You need to continue down the path, even when you can’t see it clearly and don’t know where it will lead.

Doing forces us to move, to get out of the current place. Doing helps us to see. Doing helps us to breathe.

Have you ever felt like you didn’t know what to do? What helped you get through it?

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