I believe you’ve heard people say: “Let’s sleep on the problems”. Or maybe you heard: “I wish the problems will go away by themselves”. Or maybe you say it to others every now and then?
Unfortunately problems can’t help themselves, they need to be solved. As Scott Peck stated in his book “The Road Less Traveled” (1978; p. 30):
“Problems do not go away. They must be worked through, or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit“.
A lot of people choose not to deal with their problems, because they afraid to feel the pain of dealing with the situations. They wish that one day their problems will go away and stop chasing them. But, the problems are trickier than they think. The similar problems will keep on chasing them – with different people involve, different setting and time.
I heard many motivational speakers or preachers said that through problems, our character is shaped. Through our willingness to deal with the problems, we will learn to see that life is meaningful. “Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure” (Peck, 1978; p. 16). Problems are the media for us to show courage and wisdom, and at the end let us grow mentally and spiritually.
We all know that some of us choose to be silent when they have problems. The most useful excuse is: silence is golden. I am not saying that the excuse is lame, but it is very contextual. From my perspective, silence is golden when we deal with certain people who always want to win the argument, no matter how silly is their logic. But silence is not always golden, especially when we are experiencing problems that include other people. We owe them explanations.
Silence can screams louder than spoken words, because through silence, the person let problems hanging between him/her and other parties. The wrong understanding of being silence can distort the reality of the problems.
In order to avoid distortion of our reality, we need to have a map. It’s like a usual map everywhere else, but the point was to help us view the reality – where we are, and how to get to a place that we want to go. Therefore, we need a true and accurate map, which contains of information and appreciation of reality. But, we were not born with this map, we have to make them and keep on updating the information, or else our map will be outdated, false and inaccurate. By being quiet and not doing anything, we deliberately excuse ourselves from revising our map. Revision needs a lot of effort too, in which we have to add new information, change our direction if we went the wrong way, and admitting that our map is outdated. Therefore revisions “is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful” (Peck, 1978; p. 45) and most people avoid this process.
To close this post, I will quote from Elridge Cleaver:
“If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem“.
So which one are you?
My Writing Paper 
You highlighted a truth most of us like to avoid: Growing pains are the most accurate proofs that we are growing.
Unfortunately, people tend to choose to fool themselves that problems are not there, everything is fine, life is happy, and all kinds of things should just be only fun 🙂
On the other note, not all things we sees as problems are actually problems 🙂
Thank ya Cicilia. You made me interested longer understand what it is about problems in life’s journey. I once read a book “The Power of Positive Thinking” books PEARL VINCENT Norman, he said “all human beings have a problem, if it does not have any problems mean it’s dead man”. People want to be honest or not, he had a problem or do not exactly add new problems, because he had just lied. But people want to be honest about himself to others, it could have been due to the trust factor.
So, I just want to add a comment to be modest, so that people would take the initiative to want to clean up the problems experienced.
The problem that I describe as the feet are pierced with thorns. The soles of the feet are pierced by a thorn of pain. If the thorns are not immediately removed the soles of the feet can fester over time. As a result, that person can not walk. So, however painful the process of removing a thorn from the sole of the foot should be done, so that feet someday could experience healing.
So also in human life. Humans who have a problem, should remove the problem from within him. How to remove the problems that can tell it through writing and sharing. How can problem-solving process that can work together with psychologists and the clergy, because they have each skill or grazing assistance in resolving problems. So, silence is not always mean gold. Instead, keep the matter quiet it means death.