Suffering Is A Labyrinth In Looking For Alaska

Our lives as humans greatly revolve around suffering. Whether it be losing a soccer game or losing a family member, we have all suffered. Since suffering is inevitable, people need to learn how to overcome it instead of grieving forever. Humans don't just suffer, they fight through what caused them to suffer and learn something in the process. Suffering is often compared to a labyrinth in “Looking For Alaska”, and rightfully so. A labyrinth is essentially a maze which you can easily get lost in. If you don't conquer your suffering then you can get lost in the same way. When you're convinced that something will never get better you'll also be convinced that more bad things will come your way. Of course, they will but you’ll never get rid of any of your problems if you just dwell on them forever. With countless problems over your
shoulders you'll quickly become overwhelmed and be trapped in the same spot of the maze until you start ridding yourself of your troubles. No matter how hard you try to escape the labyrinth of suffering, you never will. However, throughout your life if you overcome situations that maze will stop setting traps for you to walk over and instead you'll walk an easy path for the remainder of your life. If people never have to struggle and have a perfect life with everything handed to them, then they wouldn't be able to appreciate the satisfaction of earning something.
Also, if people never learn to deal with suffering while they're younger their reaction will be much worse when they actually have to overcome something for a change. Watching someone struggle can be painful, but often times they need to work through it themselves. For example, a baby bird must weakly peck at the egg shell covering its frail body before coming into the world. It struggles, and it would be much easier if the mother would help. Still, the mother chooses not to help knowing that if she does that baby bird will die. With humans, the consequences are usually less daunting, but still dangerous. We have been struggling ever since we were born. A mother does not carry her child everywhere because she doesn't want them to have to struggle to learn to walk. She helps them struggle in a productive way until they can walk all by themselves which is obviously a necessary skill for our whole lives. Struggle is something that we need to learn from in order to
live. When something bad happens different people have vastly differing reactions. Some will blame themselves even if they had nothing to do with it. Other will logically react, and some will just shut down and not be able to think clearly. Much like this, people cope with suffering in different ways too. In the end, how they cope doesn't matter all that much, but instead the fact that they did overcome it brings change for the good. The most important thing in getting over a struggle is to accept it and know that you're faced with difficulty for a reason. Knowing that you'll learn from a situation makes it much easier to accept it and use what you learn from it in the future. Stopping struggle before it happens is nearly impossible. The only way to do that would be to stop hoping for perfection, but that is human instinct which cannot be changed. Without a hope for perfection the world would be ugly and there would be no beautiful songs, art, or even buildings built by people who struggle to make them. Struggle is simply a part of life which you can learn to glorify. Escaping a labyrinth of suffering sounds amazing in theory, but people first need to realize that our world revolves around suffering and we need it to survive. Watching someone struggling to overcome something often feels cruel, but it often helps them grow and it would actually be unkind to let them cheat the maze. Our point in life is not to escape this “labyrinth of suffering”, but rather to grow to accept and appreciate it for the way it molds us into who we are.