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.

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.

the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.

“God is the sigh in the soul,” said the thirteenth-century Christian mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart.

You can feel this truth during those out-of-time moments when you witness something so sublime—a legendary guitar riff, a superhuman somersault—that it seems to come from a more perfect and beautiful world. This is why we revere rock stars and Olympic athletes the way we do—because they bring us a breath of magic from that other place. Yet such moments are fleeting, and we want to live in that other world for good; we’re convinced that there is where we belong.

It’s because of longing that we play moonlight sonatas and build rockets to Mars. It’s because of longing that Romeo loved Juliet, that Shakespeare wrote their story, that we still perform it centuries later.

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

The sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of connection and love; it’s what the musician Nick Cave calls “the universal unifying force.”

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

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

when our family first had to euthanize a pet, the love in that room—shared by my father, brother, and me—took my breath away. 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.

We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness—Sadness, of all things!—has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack.

“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.

bittersweet personality style Maslow called “transcenders”: people who “are less ‘happy’ than the [conventionally] healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of ‘happiness,’ but they are as prone—or maybe more prone—to a kind of cosmic sadness.”

“Sadness is like a meditation on compassion.

Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.

the moonlight sonatas of the world don’t simply discharge our emotions; they elevate them. Also, it’s only sad music that elicits exalted states of communion and awe.

We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet.

What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds.

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

it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, pre...

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,”

“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.”

“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

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.

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.

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

Everything is broken, everything is beautiful—everything, including love.

our cultural rituals—the Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, “Happy Birthday to You”—celebrate birth rather than help us live with impermanence and sorrow.

They call this thing “effortless perfection”: the pressure to appear like a winner, without needing to try. And it has many manifestations. Academically, says Nick, “you have to look as if you studied the least.

Stanford calls it “Duck Syndrome,” referring to the ability of ducks to glide smoothly across a lake as they paddle madly below the surface.

How do we get to the point of seeing our sorrows and longings not as indications of secret unworthiness but as features of humanity?

safety holds hands with fear; innovation holds hands with failure; collaboration holds hands with conflict; and inclusion holds hands with difference.

“Expressive writing” encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws that make us unfit for worldly success (or otherworldly heaven), but as the seeds of our growth.

writers who thrived after pouring their hearts onto the page tended to use phrases such as “I’ve learned,” “It struck me that,” “I now realize,” and “I understand.”

saudade, the uniquely Portuguese word meaning (as we saw in chapter 2) an intimate, melancholic longing, laced with joy and sweetness.

try writing down an “I am” statement about yourself, something based on a memory or a self-conception that’s holding you back? I can’t focus and I’m a bad employee. I’m afraid to stand up for myself. I gossip too much and hurt people.

Would the people who love you still love you if they knew what you just wrote? Would you still love you? Do you still love you?

Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending.

And there it is again: the oldest problem, the deepest dream—the pain of separation, the desire for reunion. That’s the nub of human heartache and desire, regardless of your religion, birth country, personality. That’s

“So, part of you is still stuck at sixteen, where you’re still wanting to stay bonded to your mother. Where you had to say, I can either be an individual, or feel loved, but I can’t be both.”

distress can affect our bodies at a cellular level that passes from one generation to the next.

not only can pain last a lifetime; it can last many lifetimes.

“If it’s epigenetic, it’s responsive to the environment. That means negative environmental effects are likely reversible.” In other words: Maybe there really is a way, even generations later, to transform sorrow into beauty—to turn bitter into sweet.

description of this place of so much pain and sorrow as “sacred” struck me. I thought about how the word sacrifice comes from the Latin term that means “to make sacred,”

It’s mind blowing to see where we came from, how we were treated and how we’ve survived and thrived generations later. I am grateful and humbled to be the manifestation of my ancestors’ tragedy and grief.

“he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Your responsibility is to create a life of meaning. Of growth, and transformation. It so happens that very few people grow from success. People grow from failure. They grow from adversity. They grow from pain.”