Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

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.

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

“Connecting with what matters” is realizing that the pain of loss can help point you to the people and principles that matter most to you—to the meaning in your life.

The best way to heal yourself? Heal others. I don’t believe we can escape our past. My brother and mother tried it, and it didn’t work. We have to make friends with sadness. We have to hold our losses close, and carry them like beloved children. Only when we accept these terrible pains do we realize that the path across is the one that takes us through.

But many of us are wounded healers, and our active moves toward love needn’t be so heroic or inventive. Maybe we adopt a dog and lavish it with care.

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

The fact that love sometimes returns in a different form doesn’t mean that you won’t feel seared and scalded when it goes away, or fails to appear in the first place, that its absence won’t rip your life apart. It can also feel impossible to accept that the love you long for will not return in the form you first longed for it.

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. They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcendence, nostalgia, and common humanity—the so-called sublime emotions.

One of the more compelling explanations comes from a recent study by researchers at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, who found that of all the variables influencing whether a person is likely to be moved by sad music, the strongest is empathy.

Another longstanding explanation, dating back to Aristotle, is catharsis: Did watching Oedipus gouge out his eyes on an Athenian stage help the Greeks to release their own emotional entanglements?

Others describe this longing as the answer to a cosmic mystery. “I feel that the secret of life, love, death, life’s paths taken or not taken—the Universe itself—is somehow embraced in its achingly beautiful promise,” writes the artist Peter Lucia of Sehnsucht. My favorite musician, Leonard Cohen, said that his favorite poet, García Lorca, taught him that he was “this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.”

Longing is also the ultimate muse. “My artistic life,” says songwriter-poet Nick Cave, “has centered around the desire or, more accurately, need to articulate the feelings of loss and longing that have whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood.”

As for me, I believe that the bittersweet tradition extinguishes these distinctions between atheists and believers. The longing comes through Yahweh or Allah, Christ or Krishna, no more and no less than it comes through the books and the music; they are equally the divine, or none of them are the divine, and the distinction makes no difference; they are all it. When you went to your favorite concert and heard your favorite musician singing the body electric, that was it; when you met your love and gazed at each other with shining eyes, that was it; when you kissed your five-year-old good night and she turned to you solemnly and said, “Thank you for loving me so much,” that was it: all of them facets of the same jewel.

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. As Cohen’s story suggests, the quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.

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.

Though he didn’t consider himself religious, he told his rabbi that everything he wrote was liturgy. I found out that he drew especially from the Kabbalah—the mystical version of Judaism which teaches that all of creation was once a vessel filled with holy light. But it shattered, and now the shards of divinity are scattered everywhere, amidst the pain and ugliness. Our task is to gather up these fragments wherever we find them. This philosophy made instant and perfect sense to me.

But when you do recover from any loss—when you heal, when your soul starts to heal from the shock—a new part grows, and that’s where I am now.

One of the cornerstones of Keltner’s research, which he summarized in his book Born to Be Good, is what he calls “the compassionate instinct”—the idea that we humans are wired to respond to each other’s troubles with care. Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe.

The Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns found that helping people in need stimulates the same brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal. We also know that depressed (and formerly depressed) people are more likely to see the world from others’ points of view and to experience compassion; conversely, high-empathy people are more likely than others to enjoy sad music.

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. [Emphasis added.]

Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we’ll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath—and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you’d extend to a beloved child—literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you’d shower on an adorable three-year-old. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you’re not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You’re taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.

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.

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.”

They were afraid, I think, because they knew that the smile wasn’t real, couldn’t be real. This has been our great secret, bursting recently into the open: We’re less happy than citizens of other countries, and much less happy than we appear.

And all of this the generations carry forward, into their psyches, into their families, into the body politic. If recent advances in epigenetics are any indication (as we’ll see in chapter 9), some may have passed down these experiences through the expression of their DNA, too, the cellular memory of ancient traumas encoded confusingly in American-born babies bred for optimism and cheer.

She sees a “tyranny of positivity” in which you should never cry at work but if you can’t help it then for goodness’ sake do it quietly in a bathroom stall.

if we don’t allow ourselves difficult emotions, like sorrow and longing, then these feelings will undermine us at every turn. “Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” Susan told the audience in her popular TED Talk. “Psychologists call this amplification. Like that delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator—the more you try to ignore it…the greater its hold on you. You might think you’re in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities.”

I think it’s because Susan’s so obviously joyful that people receive her message so well. They open up to her about all the things they wish they didn’t feel. “I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

“There’s an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace,” Kanov told me. “But we don’t feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it’s actually doing to us.”

But the terrible beauty of transience is much greater than we are. In our best moments, especially in the presence of sublime music, art, and nature, we grasp the tragic majesty of it. The rest of the time, we simply have to live it.

The RAADfesters believe that beating death will reveal the road to peace and harmony. And I believe exactly the opposite: that sorrow, longing, and maybe even mortality itself are a unifying force, a pathway to love; and that our greatest and most difficult task is learning how to walk it.

When children (especially those growing up in relative comfort) grieve a loss, they’re crying in part because we’ve unwittingly taught them a delusion—that things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.

“What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?” she continues. “We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you’ll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again….They’re going to move forward. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve moved on.”

Did these historical events somehow transmit to me, did they contribute to my mystery tears, as Simcha now suggests? And if so, by what mechanism—was the transmission cultural, familial, genetic, was it all three?

“People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, ‘I’m not the same person. I’ve been changed. I am not the same person that I was.’ And we have to start asking ourselves, ‘Well, what do they mean by that? Of course, they’re the same person. They have the same DNA, don’t they?’ They do. And what I think it means is that the environmental influence has been so overwhelming that it has forced a major constitutional change, an enduring transformation. And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that.”

“Research may unintentionally be received as supporting a narrative of permanent and significant damage in offspring,” she wrote in Environmental Epigenetics, “rather than contributing to discussions of potential resilience, adaptability, and mutability in biological systems affected by stress.”

We all think what we think, feel what we feel, are who we are, because of the lives of the people who came before us, and the way our souls have interacted with theirs. Yet these are also our own, singular lives. We have to hold both these truths at the same time.

We’re drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because they’re beautiful and healing, but also because they’re a manifestation of love, or divinity, or whatever you want to call it. The night my father died, I listened to music, not because I would find him there—I didn’t find him there—but because loving a parent and loving song or sport, nature or literature, math or science, are just different manifestations of the perfect and beautiful world, of the people we long to be with, the place we want to be. Your loved one may not be here anymore, but the manifestations live forever.