Taylor Knowles: Connection to Leadership Class




In my leadership class, we recently read the book, "The Journey to the East", by Hermann Hesse. It is about a man, H.H., who goes on a long journey with a secret society to try to find spiritual renewal in "the East". They continue to travel eastward, until conflict breaks loose, and many participants leave and go their own ways. At one point in the book, H.H. states that he, "is still confronted by chaos" (Hesse, 51), which relates to the cosmos versus chaos model. If there is too much chaos, there is a disruption in ones ordered reality. H.H., though, vowed not to give into the chaos bringing darkness and conflict into his reality. He also states that the time we don't have with things we are used to, the more we miss it and the less dispensable things we have seem. This relates to the "spiritual fasting" we talked about in class. The more time we have without our luxurious commoddities from home, the more we begin to appreciate what we had before.

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