The motto of the British Special Air Service encapsulates how we have chosen to spend this summer. Each member of this ORGL689 Leadership and Hardiness class have dared ourselves to be challenged physically, spiritually and mentally in pursuit of something greater than we have today. Whether we know what the greater "it" is or not is unclear. For me, it is unclear.
This summer, we could be team building, building advanced teams, looking at heroic leadership, Renaissance leadership, getting a glimpse of the present day manifestation of the Rule of St. Benedict, or a whole host of other subjects to broaden our minds and experience. We could even have taken the summer off from academics. Yet, we are enrolled in Leadership and Hardiness now, in this time in our respective lives, for our own reasons.
From Dr. Adrian Popa's first mention of this course on a Saturday morning in my late January ORGL502 residency, I have been interested in the possibilities of what could be. First, of course, it was the uniqueness of a mountain climbing for someone who grew up in the relative flats of the Midwest. After going through the work on existentialism, resiliency and hardiness in ORGL502, it clearly became more about further study of these subjects for me. I checked in frequently to see whether the class was going to take place, and I am glad so many other people had the interest to make it happen in the summer of 2011.
Mount Adams represents the physical laboratory of our learning over the summer, and the metaphorical mountain we each have to climb in order to begin to learn, reflect and start the journey to mastery of the concepts and themes for application in our respective lives.
We have dared to challenge ourselves. I hope I choose to make the consistent commitment to meet the challenges we face from the material and our time together on Mount Adams.
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