"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself." ~ Paulo Coelho

This somewhat goes with the post I wrote about the quote from Chinua Achebe. In that post I talked about how we try our hardest to avoid the suffering we endure throughout life. I also stated that we tend to avoid the suffering because we are afraid of it. We are afraid of the possibilty that we cannot overcome the struggle.

I am not sure if the fear we have is the fear of the struggle itself or rather the fear of the unknown. Fear of not knowing what will happen, fear of not knowing how to handle it, fear of not knowing. We try to avoid it all because we are unsure of the situation, unsure of how to proceed once it happens and then once it is all over. Would life be the same, or would things be totally different? Struggles in our lives turn our worlds upside down and we don't know how to cope. We fear being outside of our comfort zone, and trials take us out of them.

Our fears dominate our lives and sometimes makes things bigger/worse than they actually are. So how do we get past that so that we may be able to face our struggles head on? How do we learn to no longer fear the unknown?