Nearly two years ago a very wise friend recommended I read psychotherapist Rollo May’s The Courage To Create. At the time the library had many of his other titles but not this one.  Then a few days ago emptying out my storage space which had been sucking money into a black hole for 10 years, I pulled out a box, and there it was – The Courage To Create!  Had it all the time, but never read it.  I read it!  Wow!  Concise, intelligent, a must-read!

“Consciousness is the awareness that emerges  out of
the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.”   – Rollo May

Imagination gets so short-changed in our world, and traditionally the psychologists have not helped matters much.  Rollo May has addressed this clearly, some of these writings go back as far as 1959 but are still not as widely appreciated as they should be. Read it!

“In our day of dedication to facts and hard-headed objectivity,
we have disparaged imagination: it gets us away from “reality”; it taints our
work with “subjectivity”; and, worst of all, it is said to be unscientific. As
a result, art and imagination are often taken as the “frosting” to life rather
than as the solid food. No wonder people think of art as ‘artificial, or a
luxury, mere artifice. Throughout western history our dilemma has been whether
imagination shall turn out to be artifice or the source of being.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the
fountainhead of human experience?.”