My therapist* gave me homework at the end of our last meeting: a list of three philosophy books to read. That might sound like an odd thing for a therapist to do, but it’s not odd at all given the nature of the existential dilemmas I bring to him. One of the books was Rollo May’s The Courage to Create. It was a thought-provoking read. Let’s talk about some of the thoughts it provoked.
I think I wrote about this before, but there are two values that inform how I live my life in my 40s. One is curiosity and the other is humility. I consider curiosity to be a humanistic value: it is the passion to learn and engage with the world and with my and others’ humanity. Humility goes hand in hand with it: it’s being open to the process of change that engagement with the world engenders. It’s being comfortable with “I don’t know all the answers.” It’s the courage not to look away, even when presented with something that challenges you. To accept the possibility of making mistakes as the price of personal growth — indeed, as an intrinsic facet of the human condition. We are not perfect and we should not be scared to confront and accept the limitations borne of our imperfection.
One of my favorite mantras related to humility is “strong opinions, loosely held.” Not so loosely that they scatter away at the lightest breeze; just loose enough that they don’t become tethers that stop me from growing and evolving. I found a more eloquent description of this in May’s book, where he writes about the curious paradox of courage: “It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.”
He goes on to write: “Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.” I could also substitute “curiosity” for commitment here. Curiosity is healthiest when it doesn’t exclusively seek comfort and confirmation, but rather possesses the courage to accommodate discomfort and doubt.
May concludes:
“To believe fully and at the same time to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for the truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is a never-dying process.”
Reading the book, I was able to see a connection between the values of curiosity and humility and the concept of creativity. In my discussions with my therapist, unpacking my experience of creativity, I had previously spoken about how, after self-reflection, I have come to understand my creative process as a dialogue between myself and an Other. In retrospect, I am not surprised that he recommended me to read The Courage to Create, because here is May talking about creativity:
“Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter at its centre.”
“Creativity … is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”
To this, I would add that curiosity and humility mediate that encounter. Must do so. Encounter implies a mutual (ex)change. It is something that affects both participants, which means that it can only genuinely happen if the participants allow themselves to be affected — if they have the courage to remain open to the possibility of transformation/change/growth.
Creativity has different manifestations. For me, the obvious one is my writing, which can be conventionally labeled as “creative.” To put it in May’s terms, the act/process of writing is one means by which I encounter the world. Put differently, my books are a means of making sense of (and making legible to others) my experience of the world. Writing it down helps to give shape and meaning to that lived experience. In reading my books, the reader interprets (and re-shapes) that meaning in their own fashion, through the lens of their own lived experience. Whether or not they transmit the resulting ideas directly back to me, thus completing a loop, the encounter has happened. Both sides have (hopefully) been transformed by it, in small ways or otherwise. It’s like a conversation that happens in two different rooms, being no less impactful (to both parties) for all that it takes place at a distance.
However, The Courage to Create makes it clear that creativity isn’t limited to those acts that society labels as such. The essence of creativity is much broader. May writes:
“Persons in therapy – or anybody for that matter – are not simply engaged in knowing their world: what they are engaged in is a passionate re-forming of their world by virtue of their interrelationship with it. This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is.”
The fear of meaninglessness is an existential one, an inescapable aspect of the human condition. Countless philosophers have wrestled with it and offered different ‘solutions’ or answers to the problem. As a humanist, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is creativity – that is to say, the passion to go and encounter the world and find and create meaning in spite of the seeming meaninglessness of the world. The “in spite of” draws on the concept of courage. To create, one must have courage. (And, I would add, curiosity + humility.)
There are many ways to create meaning. Indeed, all the ways in which we encounter – engage with – the world represent an opportunity to create meaning. In each of those encounters, we shape ourselves and our values and, through giving them expression, the world around us. That is an incredibly potent alchemy. Don’t be afraid to tap into it.
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*who is really a psychoanalyst, but I feel weird typing that.