Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

But the music makes my heart open: literally, the sensation of expanding chest muscles. It even makes it seem okay that everyone I love, including me, is going to die one day. This equanimity about death lasts maybe three minutes, but each time it happens, it changes me slightly. If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all, these musically bittersweet moments are the closest I’ve come to experiencing it. But it’s happened over and over again.

This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “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.

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.

But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend.

The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.

our longing is the great gateway to belonging.

At their worst, bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being.

had no idea, then, that the music was just a gateway to a deeper realm, where you notice that the world is sacred and mysterious, enchanted even. Some people enter this realm through prayer or meditation or walks in the woods; minor-key music was the portal that happened to entice me. But these entryways are everywhere, and they take endless forms. One of the aims of this book is to urge you to notice them—and to step through.

In fact, you could say that what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality. Children splashing joyfully in puddles brings tears to grandparents’ eyes because they know that one day the children will grow up and grow old (and they won’t be there to see it). But those aren’t tears of sorrow, exactly; at heart, they’re tears of love.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. —NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Fear keeps you safe. Anger protects you from getting taken advantage of. And Sadness—what does Sadness do? Keltner had explained that Sadness triggers compassion. It brings people together.

15 to 20 percent of babies inherit a temperament that predisposes them to react more intensely to life’s uncertainty as well as its glory.

If you want to experience Keltner’s findings viscerally, watch this brilliant four-minute video that went unexpectedly viral: youtube.com/​watch?v=cDDWvj_q-o8. Produced by the Cleveland Clinic as part of a campaign to instill empathy in its caregivers, the video takes you on a short walk through the hospital corridors, the camera lingering on the faces of random passersby, people we’d normally walk past without giving a second thought—except that this time there are subtitles telling us their unseen trials (and occasional triumphs): “Tumor is malignant.” “Husband is terminally ill.” “Visiting Dad for the last time.” “Recently divorced.” And: “Just found out he’s going to be a dad.”

You see, when I think of these events, it is not the sadness that I most remember. It is the union between souls. 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. It is a time when our culture allows us to be completely honest about how we feel.

Both Darwinism and Buddhism view compassion as the greatest virtue, and the mother-infant bond as the heart of sympathy.

How then to achieve humility (especially if you find yourself in a relatively fortunate socio-economic position)? One answer is to practice the simple act of bowing down, as the Japanese do in everyday social life, and as many religious people do before God. This gesture actually activates the vagus nerve, according to Keltner. “People are starting to think about the mind-body interface in these acts of reverence,” he explained in a 2016 Silicon Valley talk.

“I become most clear when I’m engaged in suffering,” he explains. “Sadness is like a meditation on compassion. You have this burst of: There’s harm there, there’s need there. Then I leave the prison. I think about my brother, and it’s like a meditative state. I’ve always felt that way about the human condition. I’m not a tragic person. I’m hopeful. But I think sadness is beautiful and sadness is wise.”

“one of the gravest errors we make around relationships is to imagine that they aren’t things we can get wiser or better at.” This means that we should stop longing for the unconditional love of our missing half; we should come to terms with our partners’ imperfections and focus instead on fixing ourselves.

it’s the fantasy of the missing half that prevents us from appreciating the partners we do have; we’re forever comparing their flawed selves to “the amazing things we imagine about strangers, especially in libraries and trains.”

Sad music is much more likely than happy to elicit what the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp called that “shivery, gooseflesh type of skin sensation” otherwise known as “chills.” People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average. But those who favor “bittersweet” songs listen almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a “deeper connection” to the music than those whose favorites made them happy.

Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow, when the rest of the time we’ll do anything to avoid it? Now psychologists and neuroscientists are considering the question, too, and they’ve advanced various theories: A moonlit sonata can be therapeutic for people experiencing loss or depression; it can help us to accept negative emotions rather than ignoring or repressing them; it can show us that we’re not alone in our sorrows.

yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasis—a state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range. Studies even show that babies in intensive care units who listen to (often mournful) lullabies have stronger breathing, feeding patterns, and heart rates than infants hearing other kinds of music!

Even happy music produces fewer psychological rewards than sad music, concluded Sachs, Damasio, and Habibi. Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it’s sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.

But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world.

Separation, longing, and reunion are the beating heart of most religions. We long for Eden, for Zion, for Mecca; and we long for the Beloved, which is the beautiful way the Sufis refer to God.

I asked Tara’s father, Edward, a white-bearded homebuilder, whether he knew the Yiddish word kvelling. It means “bursting with pride and joy for someone you love,” I explained, “especially a child.”

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

Sufism is practiced in many forms and by many types of people all over the world, many of them Muslim, some not. All religions have their mystical branches, meaning those who seek a direct and intense communion with the divine, outside of traditional rituals and doctrines. Conventional religious leaders sometimes dismiss mystics as woolly-headed or heretical or both—perhaps fearing that anyone who bypasses religious institutions and heads straight to God could put them out of business. Since 2016, the Islamic State has killed many Sufi worshippers in mass executions.

“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. Like the magnet, it draws us deep within our own heart where we are made whole and transformed. This is why the Sufi mystics have always stressed the importance of longing. The great Sufi Ibn Arabi prayed, ‘Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire for love,’ while Rumi expressed the same truth in simple terms, ‘Do not seek for water, be thirsty.’

“Longing is different from craving,” he explains. “It’s the craving of the soul. You want to go home. In our culture it’s confused with depression. And it’s not. There’s a saying in Sufism: ‘Sufism was at first heartache. Only later, it became something to write about.’ ”

Even in the healthiest relationships, the longing often returns. In these unions, you can raise children, if you want. You can share inside jokes, favorite vacation spots, mutual admiration, and a bed; you can search the streets of a brand-new city for a heating pad when you’re traveling and your partner’s back goes out. In the best relationships, you can still, every so often, go to the moon and back.

But this is to be expected. And this is why Francesca’s story couldn’t have ended any other way. She couldn’t live happily ever after with the photographer, because he represented not an actual man, not even the “perfect” man; he represented longing itself. The Bridges of Madison County was a story about the moments when you glimpse your Eden. It was never just a story about a marriage and an affair; it was about the transience of these sightings, and why they mean more than anything else that might ever happen to you.

Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.

According to a famous early study of 573 creative leaders by the psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt, an astonishingly large percentage of highly creative people were, like Cohen, orphaned in childhood. Twenty-five percent had lost at least one parent by the age of ten. By age fifteen, it was 34 percent, and by age twenty, 45 percent!

Just as scholars of minor key music found that sadness is the only negative emotion whose musical expression uplifts us (as we saw in chapter 2), Borowiecki found that it was also “the main negative feeling that drives creativity.” [Emphasis added.]

Other studies have found that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases. For example, University of New South Wales psychology professor Joseph Forgas found that people are better able to recall items they’ve seen in a store on cloudy days compared to sunny ones, and that people in a bad mood (after being asked to focus on sad memories) tend to have better eyewitness memories of a car accident than those who’d been thinking of happy times.

There are many possible explanations, of course, for such findings. Perhaps it’s the sharpened attention that Forgas’s studies suggest. Or maybe emotional setbacks instill an extra degree of grit and persistence, which some people apply to their creative efforts; other studies suggest that adversity causes a tendency to withdraw to an inner world of imagination.

Instead, it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness—of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.

people who simultaneously experience positive and negative emotions are better at making associative leaps and at seeing connections between apparently unrelated concepts.

This doesn’t mean that we should be sad, or go deaf, even if once a century these conditions produce sublime music. Nor must we be great artists in order to view our own struggles as objects of creative transformation. What if we simply took whatever pain we couldn’t get rid of, and turned it into something else? We could write, act, study, cook, dance, compose, do improv, dream up a new business, decorate our kitchens; there are hundreds of things we could do, and whether we do them “well,” or with distinction, is beside the point. This is why “arts therapy”—in which people express and process their troubles by making art—can be so effective, even if its practitioners don’t exhibit their work on gallery walls.

Yaden has found that it’s precisely during such times—including career changes, divorces, and the ultimate transition of death—that we’re more likely to experience meaning, communion, and transcendence. This is true not only for those whose loved ones are dying, but also for the dying themselves. A surprising number, says Yaden, “experience the most important moments of their entire lives near its very end.”

The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.

Remember the linguistic origins of the word yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet. But “to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,” as the University of Nevada clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychology Today article he wrote called “From Loss to Love.” “In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”

Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, they’ve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuse—or whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes we’ll feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as “I should be over this,” “It’s all my fault,” and “Life is unfair.” Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotions—not just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept them—has been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.

There’s something about the act of speaking—of singing—the truth-telling language of sorrow and longing.

As Angelou’s story suggests, many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suffered. Angelou did this through writing, but the process takes many forms. Indeed, the “wounded healer,” a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity’s oldest archetypes. In Greek myth, the centaur Chiron was injured by a poisoned arrow that gave him terrible pain, but also curative powers. In shamanistic cultures, often healers must first undergo an initiation process involving great misery. In Judaism, the Messiah’s powers derive from his own suffering; he surrounds himself with the poor and the sick because he’s one of them. And in Christianity, Jesus is the wounded healer who cures bleeding women, hugs lepers, and dies on a cross to save us all. In modern times, wounded healers take more recognizable forms. The bereaved mother of a teen girl dead on the highway founds Mothers Against Drunk Driving. A nine-year-old whose father dies of brain cancer grows up to be a grief counselor. The survivor of a mass shooting starts a gun control organization.

From Dipa Ma, Sharon Salzberg learned the practice of loving-kindness meditation, in which you send out love to yourself, to your loved ones, and to all the people in the world. She also taught her the classic Buddhist story of the mustard seed. In the story, a woman loses her only child. Grief-stricken, she staggers across the town, her son’s corpse in her arms, searching for a doctor or sage who can bring him back to life. Finally, she meets the Buddha. He tells her that her wish will be granted; all she has to do is bring him a mustard seed. But just one thing, he adds. The seed must come from a household where no one has ever died, where they’ve never known loss or grief. The bereaved mother is thrilled, sets off on her quest, knocks on one door after another. And soon learns the lesson that Sharon encountered in her Asian philosophy class: Loss is part of life; no household is free of it. The woman buries her son, and becomes a nun and enlightened.

Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”

you’re interested in practicing my version of loving-kindness meditation, I have a guided version available on my website, at susancain.net

Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys. Many societies believe that expressing happiness invites bad luck and is a sign of selfishness, shallowness, and an uninteresting, even sinister, mind. When McDonald’s opened its first franchise in Russia, local workers were bemused by its ethos of employee cheeriness, according to the radio show and podcast Invisibilia. What is this American smile? they asked. “We are all serious about life, because life is struggle,” as one employee put it. “We were always a little bit afraid of America’s smile.”