Understand

Should you act in the world, or renounce it?

The Gita opens with Arjuna wanting to walk away, and spends eighteen chapters answering.

One reading

Renunciation is the higher path — step back from action and the entanglements it brings.

BG 5.13 — Mentally renouncing all actions, the sovereign dweller in the body resteth serenely in the nine-gated city, neither acting nor causing to act. read →
BG 18.49 — He whose Reason is everywhere unattached, the self-subdued, dead to desires, he goeth by renunciation to the supreme perfection of freedom from obligation. read →

The tension

No one rests even a moment without acting; the real renunciation is of the fruit, not the work.

BG 3.4 — Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining from activity, nor by mere renunciation doth he rise to perfection. read →
BG 3.5 — Nor can anyone, even for an instant, remain really actionless; for helplessly is everyone driven to action by the qualities born of nature. read →
BG 5.2 — Renunciation and yoga by action both lead to the highest bliss; of the two, yoga by action is verily better than renunciation of action. read →
BG 6.1 — He that performeth such action as his duty, independently of the fruit of action, he is an ascetic, he is a Yogi, not he that is without fire, and without rites. read →

My reading

The Gita doesn't split the difference — it redefines the terms. Renouncing action outright is impossible for an embodied being (3.5). Renouncing the fruit of action while doing the work fully (5.2, 6.1) delivers what the forest-renouncer wanted without leaving your post. Arjuna's instinct to drop the bow is answered as a category error, not a moral failure.