Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

We’re just humans, sing the cellos, just humans: flawed and beautiful and aching for love.

humors, or liquid substances, each corresponding to a 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.

“Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.

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

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.

periaqueductal

“inconsolable longing” for we know not what, or Sehnsucht, a German term based on the words das Sehnen (“the yearning”) and sucht (“an obsession or addiction”).

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

Then she asked the students to speak to an audience about their dream jobs. Unbeknownst to her subjects, she arranged for some of these talks to be greeted supportively, with smiles and nods, and others with frowns and head shaking. After the talk, she asked the students how they were feeling; unsurprisingly, those with receptive audiences were in a better mood than the ones who thought they’d bombed. But she also asked the students to make a collage, which professional artists later rated for creativity. The students who faced disapproving audiences created better collages than the ones who were smiled upon. And those who received negative audience feedback and had low levels of DHEAS—that is, the students who were both emotionally vulnerable and suffered rejection from the audience—made the best collages of all.

We don’t even necessarily need to create art ourselves. According to a study of more than fifty thousand Norwegians, conducted by Koenraad Cuypers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, immersing oneself in creativity, whether as creator or as consumer, via concerts, art museums, or other media, is associated with greater health and life satisfaction, and lower rates of anxiety

When the pandemic started, I fell into the habit of “doomscrolling” Twitter and marinating in online toxicity, especially first thing in the morning. This produced a state of mind that was the exact opposite of what Rothko described. I decided to transform my Internet addiction by following art accounts instead: first a few, then a dozen; the next thing I knew, my feed was full of art, and my spirit felt lighter. Soon after that, I found myself starting each morning by sharing a favorite

Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering—or find someone who makes it for you. And if you do find yourself drawn to such a person, ask yourself why they call to you. What are they expressing on your behalf—and where do they have the power to take you?

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.

Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die off—a job will be lost, a relationship will end—and, if you’re ready, other occupations, loves, will arise in their place. What follows may or may not be “better” than what came first. But the task is not only to let the past go, but also to transform the pain of impermanence into creativity—and transcendence.

connecting with what matters, and taking committed action—that move us from bitter to sweet, from loss to love. “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

to the meaning in your life. “Taking committed action” is acting on those values. “Your loss can be an opportunity to carry what is most meaningful toward a life worth living,”

You mean you’re supposed to feel this way? You mean this is normal? You mean, just because you’re in pain doesn’t mean you’re weird, doesn’t mean you don’t belong?

A heart full of love doesn’t necessarily require physical presence, he said. If she were the child and you were the parent, he said, the responsibility would be different; you would have to be there. But as the child, the love can

be present, even when you’re not physically together. Ever the doubter, I asked Sharon what this actually meant. “Maybe it makes the daughter feel good,” I said, “because she’s the one who gets to sit around thinking about loving-kindness. But her mother’s far away, and she has no idea any of this is happening. All she knows is that her daughter refuses to see her. So what good does it really do?” “Making yourself feel good is not a nothing,” Sharon said. This hadn’t occurred to me. “It also allows the connection to grow,” she added. “Maybe she’ll write to her mother and tell her that she’s thinking of her. Maybe she’ll tell her that she wishes her well. Maybe one day she’ll be ready to meet her in person, in a public place that feels safe.”

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

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

“But safety holds hands with fear; innovation holds hands with failure; collaboration holds hands with conflict; and inclusion holds hands with difference. These business outcomes depend on an openness to the bittersweet. Indeed, on normalizing bittersweet.”

if you think you’re enlightened, you should go spend a week with your family at Thanksgiving.)