If you’re facing a growing problem and the only options you can see are bad vs worse, scary vs terrifying, horrible vs catastrophic, painful vs excruciating, and you’re about 75% to 80% sure that you know what you’re going to have to do no matter how bad, scary, horrible, and painful it will be, but you keep urging yourself to be patient, to not make any rash decisions, to let your emotions cool off so you don’t act in the heat of passion, is that caution and maturity speaking in your head or fear and cowardice looking for any excuse at all to delay facing the situation and acting?
Or are they the same?