By renaming it, the path is now saved and won’t disappear on me if I go to create a new path. Also, any saved paths are saved with the Photoshop document, so now, if I save my document, the path will be saved with it and the next time I open the document, the path will still be there in the Paths palette.
Saving a path is not something you need to do in order to turn it into a selection. In most cases when using the Pen Tool to make selections, you won’t have any need for the path once you’ve made a selection from it, so there won’t be any need to save it. If you did want to save it though, just rename it to something other than "Work Path" and it’s saved.
To turn the path into a selection, if we look at the bottom of the Paths palette, we can see several icons. These icons allow us to do different things with our path. The first icon on the left is the Fill path with Foreground coloricon, and as its name implies, clicking on it will fill our path with our current Foreground color. Interesting, but that’s not what we want. The second icon from the left is the Stroke path with brush icon, which will apply a stroke to our path using whatever brush we currently have selected.
This is a great way to create interesting effects in Photoshop, but for what we’re doing here, turning a path into a selection, it’s not what we want either. The one we want is the third icon from the left, the Load path as a selectionicon: