Journeys Essay

A journey is only valuable if it challenges our assumptions and allows us to develop spiritually or emotionally. To what extent is this perspective represented in texts you have studied?
Journeys prove to be extremely beneficial through the spiritual and emotional development they bring, particularly when they challenge our assumptions. The experiences on these journeys are confronted by a variety of choices and obstacles, which challenge our thinking and presumptions. Through the obstacles in the journey the individual is allowed to grow and develop spiritually and emotionally. This perspective is expressed to a certain extent through the excerpt from the novel “The ‘Town Where Time Stands Still” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S Elliot, and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
Journeys are embarked on in a search for spiritual fulfilment through valuable experiences and insights. “The Town Where Time Stands Still” echoes this major concept through the use of figurative language and emotive words, suggesting, though journeys are seemingly undertaken for simple reasons, the driving force behind them is in fact an unconscious eternal search for spiritual fulfilment. “Travellers through the centuries have threaded their baser motives of profit and pleasure with a subtler…unconscious compulsion-the search for the genii loci”. The quote conveys how journeys have challenged our assumptions through the centuries as though they are mixed motivations behind them, the true reason for travel is a search for spiritual fulfilment. Strong emotive words such as ‘baser’ and ‘compulsion’ show bias and are not supported with facts implicating that the assertions are hypothesised from pure speculation and are not true of all journeys. This text also highlights the power with which people are drawn towards this spiritual fulfilment. “They seek an external geography to act on their internal psychology like an irresistible force”. This conveys that humans