The question of the week is, “When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards and just do what you know is right?” This points to the human tendency to logically think things through before acting, especially on big decisions. In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this is slow thinking. Fast thinking, on the other hand, is actually our default mindset of being intuitive and emotional. The idea is that fast thinking can usually get us pretty far and is necessarily the system we rely on the most throughout the day, (can you imagine spending hours researching which toothpaste to use every morning?), while slow thinking is something we consciously engage when we need to. 

Our intuitive mind is more or less a product of evolution, but as Martial Artists we see how we can train ourselves to intuitively understand new things. When I had a punch thrown at me the first time, I’m pretty sure I did the equivalent of getting squashed in Mr. Miyagi’s famous line about decisiveness: “Walk on road. Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish, just like grape.” I stood there, unsure of which way to go, and my partner took mercy on me and didn’t punch me too hard. Years later, my body automatically moves thanks to my training. This ability to quickly perceive an attack and move out of the way is now intuitive. 

One of our goals is to transfer this ability to life outside the dojo. We’ll never get to the point where every decision we have to make is automatic; life is too complex. But we can practice so that the most common and most important ones are quick and easy decisions. They will often be so quick that they don’t even seem like decisions, rather just the only plausible action. 

So back to the question of the week: When do we know it’s time to stop thinking and just act? It’s not always as obvious and simple as a punch coming at us, so when we are deliberating in those less common situations, how do we know it’s time? The samurai Yamamoto Tsunemoto says, With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. Yet seven breaths might not be enough for some decisions, like which car to buy or whether to leave your job. 

I believe we can put this idea into practice after it has become clear that we have all the pertinent information. At some point, we tend to spin in our heads and replay the same internal dialogue over and over. Maybe we’ve whittled the choices from all possible cars down to just two and we just keep going back and forth between them. When we notice the same points repeating, it is clear that further deliberating pros and cons, worries, etc will get us nowhere. At that point, we will likely be able to decide within the span of seven breaths. Then, we move forward with whatever decision we’ve made without second-guessing, as if the punch is thrown and it’s time to move.