I was hiking in the woods one day, a grueling walk uphill, thinking about a particular problem in my life for which I needed a quick answer. Or at least I thought I did. I stopped for a breather and started hearing the thunderous sound of wind at the top of the hill I was climbing. I love the sound of the wind, which is always made louder by the sound of the trees it blows. So I stood there listening for awhile, hearing it come slowly down the hill, causing the trees along the way to dance with its rhythm. I seemed to be called by this one tree directly across from me, standing in complete stillness. I watched it for a full minute, awed by its stillness. Then the wind, having reached my station on the hill, slammed into the tree, causing it to bend way over and swing back in a lovely dance.

And then I knew.

I knew that it wasn’t time to know the answer to my dilemma just yet. Why? Because the wind had not yet blown. I was being instructed by nature, to wait in stillness until the wind of knowing came. I would know when it was time to know.

The way of uncertainty is difficult. We, particularly in Western culture, believe that we are to find solutions to problems immediately—if not sooner. And if we do not know what to do, we complain to our therapists, “I don’t know what to do!” Sometimes we ask others, “What should I do?” To the rest of the world, we may pretend that we know what we are doing in a kind of “fake-it-till-you-make-it” style. Because if the great They out there discovers that we don’t really know the solution to the problem then we feel that we have somehow failed and should be ashamed of ourselves.

The interesting thing about nature is that it can be very informative if we pay attention. That tree standing in stillness has its own lesson. Its stillness is an answer in and of itself. It does what trees do. It stands there—not waiting, not necessarily knowing, just standing there. And then the wind blows and it is moved.

Is it possible for us to stand still—just doing what we do without the expectation that we should know always what to do? By this I don’t mean that we never get out of bed in the morning or perform the tasks of our day. Just standing still means, here, coming from a different place. We are living from the inside.

It means that we make reference to what is going on internally as we act and experience. It means that our reference is not all external. It means that there is a kind of stillness in the doing that registers in the mind as mindfulness. Mindfulness is that attendance to the internal world without judgment that allows us to be still even as we are living.

If you think again about that tree, there is a whole lot going on inside it: water running to the leaves, new sapwood forming, etc. But the tree on the outside is not moving—not until the wind blows.

How to Know

We can look at finding solutions to our problems or answers to our questions in just the same way. If we attend to our inner workings as we live from inside out, we will be aware when the wind blows and we will know what to do.

So many times, we miss the wind blowing because we are so focused on what we think we should do or shouldn’t do—trying to find the “right” course of action. Then, when the wind actually does blow, we can’t feel it because we are not focused internally enough to notice or believe in the external circumstance that actually wants to move us. Things are happening all around us that give us answers, but we are not paying attention because we are busy ruminating about what we want, what is the right thing to do, what we should do, what we have to do, what others want us to do. We get so busy describing the problem over and over to others, hoping that they will tell us what to do, that we can’t feel the wind blowing all around us.

We are not supposed to be certain all the time of everything. Uncertainty is simply a time for stillness. It is not a time for running around, as my mother used to say, “like a chicken with its head cut off.” Uncertainty is a time for inner reflection, for mindfulness. You can’t know until you know. You may think you know when someone else advises you—that is until someone else says just the opposite. But until the authentic Self within you knows—you don’t know. Something will resonate within you that says, “Yes, this is it. This is what I’m going to do.” Until then, you just don’t know.