Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

different temperament: melancholic (sad), sanguine (happy), choleric (aggressive), and phlegmatic (calm).

“bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.

The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.

It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.

Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2] This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.

we’ve organized American culture around the sanguine and the choleric, which we associate with buoyancy and strength.

But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine.

The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.

our longing is the great gateway to belonging.

What’s really driving our longing for “perfect” and unconditional love

Why does creativity seem to be associated with longing, sorrow—and transcendence?

But to the realization that you don’t have to believe in specific conceptions of God in order to be transformed by spiritual longing.

you could say that what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality.

This book is about the riches of the bittersweet tradition—and how tapping into them can transform the way we create, the way we parent, the way we lead, the way we love, and the way we die. I hope it will also help us to understand each other, and ourselves.

The real reason for his emotions—for all our emotions—is to connect us.

And Sadness, of

all the emotions, was the ultimate b...

Fear keeps you safe. Anger protects you from getting taken advantage of.

Sadness triggers compassion. It brings people together.

The word compassion literally means “to suffer together,”

Sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have.

When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care.

helping people in need stimulates the same brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal.

sadness sits in the same location as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies; in the same place as our desire to be rewarded and to enjoy life’s pleasures.

Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.”

Many of us have long perceived the power of sadness to unite us, without fully articulating it, or thinking to express it in neuroscientific terms.

When we experience sadness, we share in a common suffering. It is one of the few times when people allow themselves to be truly vulnerable.

But humans, Keltner told me, “have taken compassion to a whole new level. There’s nothing like our capacity for sorrow and caring for things that are lost or in need.”

“We are impelled to relieve the sufferings of another,” wrote Darwin, “in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved.”

Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they’re vigilant types who take good care of their health. They’re strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They’re good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle.

If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other.

An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others’ sadness—and even to our own.

simple act of bowing down, as the Japanese do in everyday social life, and as many religious people do before God. This

according to Keltner. “People are starting to think about the mind-body interface in these acts of reverence,”

suffering a profound sense of rootlessness.

Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.

“The Anti-Romantic Daydream,”

yearning flourishes in the realm of romantic love—but it doesn’t derive from it. Rather, the yearning comes first, and exists on its own; romantic love is just one expression of it.

neuroscientists Matthew Sachs and Antonio Damasio, along with psychologist Assal Habibi, reviewed the entire research literature on sad music, and posited that yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasis—a state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range.

Also, it’s only sad music that elicits exalted states of communion and awe. Music conveying other negative emotions, such as fear and anger, produces no such effect. Even happy music produces fewer psychological rewards than sad music, concluded Sachs, Damasio, and Habibi.

We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se.

What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet.

We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world.

The state of longing strikes contemporary ears as passive, gloomy, and helpless, but pothos was understood to be an activating force.

At the heart of all these traditions is this pain of separation, the longing for reunion, and, occasionally, the transcendent

“Longing is what Sufism is all about,” he exclaimed, lighting up. “The whole practice is based on longing—longing for union, longing for God, longing for the Source. You meditate, practice loving-kindness, serve others, because you want to go home.”

“Listen to the story told by the reed,” it begins, “of being separated….Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.”

Home isn’t a place. Home is where that longing is, and you don’t feel good until you’re there.

At the time of this conversation, I was just as agnostic as ever, but I was also deep into the writing of this book, and something was opening up in me. I was starting to understand—not only intellectually, but also viscerally—what the religious impulse was. I was losing my lifelong dismissiveness of it. The intense and transformative reaction that I had to minor-key music was apprehension of the transcendent, I was realizing; it was transformation of the consciousness. It wasn’t belief in God, exactly, or at least not the specific God of the ancient books. But it was the spiritual instinct come alive.

“Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God,” he writes. “Once longing is awakened within the heart it is the most direct way Home.