The book charged my heart and helped change how I lived my life. A mentor gave me a copy when I was 22 and in grad school. I’ve been re-reading his seminal book The Courage to Create. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety but also great joy.”

That’s why I say ‘ the courage to create.’ Creation does not come out of simply what you’re born with. That’s the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. Musicians… always showed considerable anxiety, because they were in the process of loving beauty, of feeling joy when they heard a beautiful combination of notes. Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims. I’m not against anybody feeling good or having happy hours, but joy is something different from that. One can own the world and still be without the inner sense of pleasure, of joy, of courage, of creation. Now none of those things lead to the joy, the creativity that I’m talking about. We try to avoid anxiety by getting rich, by making a hundred thousand dollars when we’re twenty-one years of age, by becoming millionaires. Ur knowledge of our death is what gives us a normal anxiety that says to us, ‘ Make the most of these years you are alive.’ And on our impulse to move away from anxiety: In this Thinking Allowed Interview, his comments speak directly to our times: He has much to say about creativity and death, about our avarice for money over meaning, and about a joy deeper than ephemeral happiness. In the post-World War II 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, he contributed most notably to helping us honor life’s mystery and meaning and to be courageous and creative in a troubled world.Īs we talk in this disruptive early 21st-century about what it means to to be creative and to be brave, Rollo May merits a place in the conversation. He went on to pursue studies in English, psychotherapy, and even ministry. He learned early to empathize with those who view reality differently, and he learned early how to fend for himself. When Rollo May was a boy, his mother often left him alone with his schizophrenic sister.

The Courage to Create by Rollo May