“You do not know where your decisions come from, they pop up like hiccups. 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 in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is you go through the motions of thinking about out what you will do about this, but 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 wobbling, and so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, 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 carried away doing the entirely the wrong thing.
You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see clouds never makes mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? Heh, no they always do the right thing! But if will treat yourself for awhile as a cloud, a wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do. Because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it 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.”
– Alan Watts