Today, I opened a book at random and found the following quote by Rollo May:
“The boundaries of our world shift under out feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order.”
The quote reminded me of reading several existentialists’ books when I was in my twenties. Rollo May, 1909-1994, was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will in 1969. Paul Tillich, philosopher and theologian, was a close friend. According to Wikipedia, “Anxiety is a major focus of Rollo May and is the subject of his work “The Meaning of Anxiety”. He defines it as “the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self” (1967, p. 72)…
“One way in which Rollo proposes to fight anxiety is by displacing anxiety to fear as he believes that ‘anxiety seeks to become fear’. He claims that by shifting anxiety to a fear, one can therefore discover incentives to either avoid the feared object or find the means to remove this fear of it.”
Since fear is one of the themes with my WIP, Norman in the Painting, I can use Rollo’s propositions in Jill’s character. Fear is natural to people and writers often use fear in their writing. In Chapter 18, Jill’s underlying fears are challenging her comfort zone. What felt like a simple fear in her past has multiplied to many fears that dash her environmental security.
Here are more quotes by Rollo May:
Has any of Rollo’s quotes inspired you or resonated with what you are writing now?
