“The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers.”
--- Goethe
It is ironic, wouldn't you agree, that one of the greatest obstacles to a truly creative life is too overpowering a yearning for safety?
Carl Jung spoke of the creative life, one in tune with art, spirituality, and the present moment, as requiring the opus contra naturam. Literally, it is indeed "a work against nature," going upstream, to resist the entropy toward the familiar, and to choose for bringing two or more previously unlinked ideas into a single space. (This is what Harvard psychiatrist, Albert Rothenberg, calls "homospatial process," or more simply, creativity.)
Years ago, out of a dream, the following words came to me: "Sometimes a brilliant mistake is preferable to a more mediocre correctness." Here then is to risking safety, even risking to make a mistake, in order to invite in the creative act...
Babe Ruth may have said it most clearly: "Never let fear of striking out get in your way."
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