The Courage to Create
by Rollo May, 1975
Rollo May on “the meaning of anxiety” and “the courage to create”:
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.”—Rollo May, The Courage to Create
“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the ‘divine madness,’ to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”― Rollo May, The Courage to Create
The Courage to Create (1975) is one of Rollo May’s most beloved books, a small collection of essays that are as eloquent as they are profound. Here is May musing, briefly, on the conjoined themes of anxiety and creativity—inseparable touchstones for his insights both as psychologist and philosopher. One cannot have the second, May would insist, without the first. The book was written, Rollo’s wife, Georgia, told me shortly before she passed away, as a sort of guide for living written for undergraduates while teaching a course at Princeton many years ago. A charming story given the book’s enormous appeal far beyond its parochial origins.
This clip ends abruptly, I will say, for someone as graceful as Rollo May, but it’s worthwhile for Consortium readers to glimpse the man in his own (videotaped) words and person even so. In his final book, Nietzsche imagines one who “not only speaks differently, but also is different.” In Zen, we might call it “direct pointing.”
"It's what makes us human beings". Twenty years ago as I read 'The Meaning of Anxiety' I learned of my maternal grandfathers death. On the journey home to central New York, I felt a nagging pull to do and say something at the funeral. At the time, public speaking was a source of immeasurable fear and anxiety - I would drench in sweat, stumble on words, and omit the majority of what was intended to convey - despite being told that I had interesting thoughts. I decided I would test May's thesis by writing a eulogy and speak what came to me about my papa, a man of very few words himself. My speech was received with the love and humor I intended. Afterwards, his daughter, my mother, told me how speaking publicly was papa's greatest fear, how he had a stammer as a child resulting in ridicule and shame. I felt a new awareness of his sense of self and how that played a part his sparing, heartfelt messages.