Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

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

It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves “secular” or “religious”: in some fundamental way, we’re all reaching for the heavens.

My mother was convinced that she’d done something horribly wrong to make her own mother so sick—and tormented by an insatiable desire to be seen.

panicked, hostile accusations would follow. Waves of anger, floods of tears; days, then weeks, of stony silence.

the rules in my house were different from theirs, that to break them was not to commit an adolescent transgression but to destroy my mother’s fragile psyche.

grew skilled at gauging her mood the moment I entered. I felt I mustn’t do anything to upset her equilibrium or trigger her rage.

To grow up was to condemn her to darkness.

In short, I recorded all the things I couldn’t tell her in real life, because I knew that to share them would have been emotional matricide.

I felt that I was, in some psychologically true point of fact, my mother’s killer.

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

the love you long for will not return in the form you first longed for it.

I still long for my mother’s life to have unfolded differently, still wish that she’d loved herself, or even liked herself just a little.

“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.”

“Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God,”

But most likely, your relationship will be an asymptote of the thing you long for.

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.

At the heart of mysticism is the idea that God’s absence is not so much a test of faith as the road to divine love; longing brings you closer to that for which you long.

very word sacrifice is from the Latin sacer-ficere, which means “to make sacred.”)

She’d come to know what she calls “the upside of loss.”

“But I’ve been reborn. When one door closes, another opens—all the clichés about rebirth are true. There’s space now for a new me to emerge. It’s not something I would have chosen. I would have happily been a complete unit with my violin for the rest of my life. 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.

something about sadness that removes the scales from our eyes.

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

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.

But our “premature” birth date turns out to be one of the more hopeful facts about our species. It means that the more intelligent our species grew, the more sympathetic we had to become, in order to take care of our hopelessly dependent young.

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

“emotional agility,” which she defines as a process of “holding difficult emotions and thoughts loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to ignite change in your

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.

“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.”

Greatness, he told me, often comes from developing a superpower that adapts to the blow that almost killed you.

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

“It’s urgent to live enchanted.”

“Those who let their eyes adjust,” my cookie reads, “can see in the darkness.”

What once was will never be again.

this longing for Eden, as Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien put it, is “our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human.”

“paradox of aging.” After all, no matter how wise you might be, it’s still no fun to inhabit a weakening body, or to fill your calendar with funerals as your friends and family die.

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.

When my turn comes, I talk about my mother—of our great rift when I was a teenager, of feeling, back then, that I’d killed her spirit.

“I hear that there’s not been a full and healthy individuation,” he tells me. “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.”

Simcha says something else: that I’m carrying not only my own grief; I’m carrying my mother’s grief, too, and the grief of her mother and father, and their mothers and fathers. I’m carrying the grief of the generations.

“You’re permeable,” he says, nodding. “It’s hard for you to know what’s yours, and what belongs to other people. To the people who came before you. “But you can keep the connection to the generations alive,” he adds, “without holding on to their pain.”

the word sacrifice comes from the Latin term that means “to make sacred,”

“People tell me I’m too serious and I should let go and have fun. But I don’t care about fun. I care about feeling.”

We’re all given legacies, he explains. “We don’t have a choice. Legacies can be profoundly

We can set ourselves free from the pain: We can see that our forebears’ stories are our stories, but they’re also not our stories.

She is my mother, there is no other. I know now that the tears I couldn’t stop all these years came not because I separated from her at age seventeen; they came because I didn’t separate.

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.

Now I was thirty-three, with no career, no love, no place to live.

If you’re this obsessed, it’s because he represents something you long for.

What are you longing for?