Just get it over with!

Isn't it funny how often the fear of something happening is more terrible than the actual thing itself? It's an interesting fact of life that I've seen come up in my own experience over and over again. I've also seen the idea approached in many interesting ways.

My favourite example of this is from a cartoon I used to watch occasionally when I was in Junior High. I say occasionally because honestly, it wasn't all that great, but sometimes it would have an episode that was just golden. This one was just such an episode.

The basic premise was that in this kingdom, there was a monster that had come up from out of the sea and was approaching the town these characters lived in. This monster was very large, formidable, and dangerously powerful. That made the situation bad. What made it much worse, was the fact that this monster had the peculiar attribute of taking ever shorter steps. Each step it made toward the kingdom was half the length of the last step, and according to the calculations of a robot in the city, the monster would never stop approaching the city, but it would also never reach it.

The king thought this was excellent news, but the townspeople were nearly driven mad by this revelation, because they were in constant expectation of an attack. They were so fearful of what would happen that they eventually convinced the king to send people out to figure out a way to get the monster to actually get it to them right away and attack the kingdom! That's how desperate they were. So in the end, they succeeded, and the monster ran into the kingdom, destroyed a bunch of stuff, and ran off. When it was all over, the people celebrated in the streets because they could finally move on with their lives and stop living in fear!

These last few days I've been plagued with a certain decision I had to make, and now that I've made it, it's like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Honestly, this afternoon I didn't care what the outcome was anymore, I just wanted to be DONE. I was so sick of trying to decide and worrying about the consequences of the decision. No matter what the outcome was, I just wanted it to come so that I could deal with it and get it over with.


It's amazing to me how often this can be applied to novels. How much better is it to have the constant fear of death hanging over a character rather than just killing them outright? How much more intense is it to watch a character trying to figure out how something is going to happen rather than just finding out right away?

I see this as another thing that can kind of go hand in hand with the idea that the journey can oftentimes be more important than the destination. When I was building my tree-fort, I enjoyed the act of building just as much, if not more than just having it there in the woods. In the same way, I think that we can sometimes learn a lot more about ourselves, and about patience and confronting fear by going through these times of uncertainty. It forces us to really take a look at what we're doing and make tough choices. I feel like this has been a sucky couple of days to slog through, but in the end, I'm glad to have had them, because they've made me a better decision maker, and have challenged me in new, important ways.


How often do you wish you could skip the waiting and get straight to the outcome, be it good or bad?