Do the Right Thing

When life hands you a difficult choice, try this time-tested process for discovering your dharma—the right action for this situation.

By Sally Kempton

One June morning in 2003, I took my seat on an airplane next to a man with a chiseled face and beautifully pressed clothes. As we talked, he told me about a dilemma he faced: People in the Democratic Party wanted him to run for president and he wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. He had already had a military career and felt that he was done with being a commander. He liked private life. Still, some part of him felt that, given the way things were going in the country, maybe it was his duty to try to lead. The problem, he told me, is that when you put yourself into the political arena, your opponents will do whatever they can to try to destroy you. He wasn't sure he wanted to subject himself to such intense personal attacks.

When the flight was over and he gave me his card, I discovered that I'd been sitting next to General Wesley Clark. I was struck by how much his life-path crisis mirrored the one immortalized in the Bhagavad Gita, when Arjuna is faced with having to fight his own kinsmen in a world war. It was in response to a dilemma much like Clark's that Lord Krishna gave Arjuna a teaching that has literally rung down through the centuries: "Better your own dharma—your personal duty—even if unsuccessful, than the dharma of another done perfectly."

As it turned out, General Clark did follow his warrior's dharma. He got into the fight, and as we now know, it played out unsuccessfully. Perhaps he wished afterward that he had listened to his doubts and stayed out of the primaries. My hope is that he felt good about what was in fact a courageous act of personal dharma, regardless of the outcome.

Before we go any further, let me clarify what I mean by personal dharma. Your personal dharma is the path you follow toward the highest expression of your own nature and toward the fulfillment of your responsibilities to yourself, to others, to your society, and to the planet. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna often speaks of dharma as something inborn, a life calling that each of us has been given and from which we depart at our peril. But he also uses the word to mean right action, and for most of us, personal dharma comes down to that most basic question: What is the right thing for me to do now? or, Given my nature, my skills, and my personal preferences, what actions should I take to support the greater good?

Often, we associate dilemmas of dharma with situations in which our desires are in conflict with our sense of personal or professional responsibility. (As in, Is it OK for me to date my yoga instructor? or, Is it all right to insist that clients pay me in cash so I don't have to declare that part of my income?) But just as often, our conflicts of dharma are not about desires at all but about competing responsibilities. Sometimes we're faced with choices in which no matter what we do, someone will get hurt.

Even when the right thing to do is obvious, you may not always be the right person to do it. (If you can't swim, it may be in everyone's best interest for you not to jump into the river to try to save a drowning child.) The right action for you at a given moment may not be the right action for me. That's what makes the contemplation of personal dharma so tricky and so vital.

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