The Forest Without Paths
We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man's land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize.
, The Courage to Create (1975) · Excerpt
May offered this passage in 1975, as part of a larger meditation on what creativity demands from those who practice it. But the predicament he describes has only deepened. He was thinking about the creative act itself: the moment when you face the blank canvas, the empty page, the unformed idea, and must bring something into existence where nothing existed before. The forest he describes has no trails, no guidebook, no reassurance. There is only the willingness to enter it anyway.
Something shifts when the forest seems to come pre-mapped. Tools now exist that can generate paths through it almost instantaneously, producing clearings and structures that look remarkably like the ones a human explorer might have found. The nothingness May describes, that anxiety of the truly blank, may be harder to sit with now than it has ever been, because there is always a way to avoid it.
And yet something in his phrasing holds: the idea that the courage required has “no immediate precedent.” Every genuine creative act is its own first time. No amount of previous experience or available technique fully prepares you for the next encounter with what you do not yet know. The willingness to be lost, to feel the ground disappear, seems inseparable from whatever discovery happens in the making. A path cut through that forest is shaped by the particular person who cut it, by the wrong turns and doublings-back and moments of panic that no one else would have taken in quite the same way.
We all sense this when we hold something we’ve made and feel the honest weight of it, or the honest absence of weight. The nature of creative courage may have shifted since 1975, but the forest is still there. It is still dark.