The Best Way Out of a Problem is Through it.
My grandfather was an indentured sugarcane farmer and when I was a first year teacher he told me a story that intrigued me.
He said that he ploughed around a large rock in one of his fields for years. While doing this he had damaged several of the blades of his plough and even a few ploughs as well. He had grown rather morbid and gruesome about that rock.
After breaking another new plough blade one day and remembering all the trouble the rock had caused him through the years he was finally determined to do something about it.
When my grandfather put his crowbar under the rock, he was surprised to discover that it was only about a foot thick and that it could be broken up easily. So he broke it into pieces and when he was carting it away he had to smile to himself and remembered all the trouble that the rock had caused him and how easy it would have been to get rid of it much sooner.
Then he passed this wisdom to me and I still treasure his words. He said that there was often a temptation to bypass small obstacles when we were in a hurry to get a large problem solved. We simply do not want to stop and take the needed time to deal with it immediately. Like I used to do, they just plough around it. Usually we tell ourselves that we will come back to it later but what really often happens is that we never do.
So he said, if the obstacle is of a type that will keep reappearing over and over, we are usually better off to take the time to fix it and be done with it. However, if we are tempted to go around it time and time again, then we should tarry a little and should ask ourselves, if the cost in time and money and trouble is worth it.
He concluded that the best way out of a problem is through it. I agreed and followed his wisdom all my life and still do.