More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Aristotle wondered why the great poets, philosophers, artists, and politicians often have melancholic personalities.
Mainstream psychology sees it as synonymous with clinical depression.[*1]
It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential.
If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect.
This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.
We’re taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (“Crybaby!”), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives.
In a study of more than seventy thousand people, Harvard psychologist Dr. Susan David found that one-third of us judge ourselves for having “negative” emotions such as sadness and grief. “We do this not only to ourselves,” says David, “but also to people we love, like our children.”
The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.
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.
Buddhist idea that, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell put it, we should strive “to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
How should we live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die? Do we inherit the pain of our parents and ancestors, and if so, can we also transform that into a beneficent force?
you don’t have to believe in specific conceptions of God in order to be transformed by spiritual longing.
high scorers on the Bittersweet Quiz and the trait identified by psychologist and author Dr. Elaine Aron as “high sensitivity.”[*2]
That if only I would do the right thing, my mother, whom I loved more than anyone and anything, would be happy again. And so would I.
in which the parent tells the child that she can be herself or be loved but she can’t be both,
my tendency to avoid conflict, distrust my own reality, defer to others with stronger opinions.
There was one me who marched to her own drummer, who followed her own true north, as I’m constitutionally inclined to do. And there was the other me, who surfaced during times of discord, who assumed that other people’s interpretations of events must be correct and should naturally trump mine.
the very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it’s not.
What are you separated from; what or whom have you lost? Did the love of your life betray you? Did your parents divorce when you were young, did your father die, was he cruel? Did your family reject you when they discovered your true sexuality, do you miss home, or the country of your birth, do you need to hear its music to fall asleep at night? How are you supposed to integrate this bitter with your sweet, how are you supposed to feel whole again?
Even once you break free (and you can break free), these siren songs may call you back to your accustomed ways of seeing and thinking and reacting.
You can learn to block your ears most of the time, but you’ll have to accept that they’re always out there singing.
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.
“to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,”
“In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”
use our pain as a source of information about what matters most to us—and then to act on it.
ACT, in other words, is an invitation to investigate the bitter, and commit to the sweet.
If the joy of connecting to others is important to you, what are you going to do with the pain of being misunderstood or failing to understand others?”
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.
“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.
“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,” writes Hayes.
“After having identified what is truly close to your ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The best way to heal yourself? Heal others.
everyone faces the pain of separation, that no one is spared, that the real question is how to respond to this unchanging truth.
Loss is part of life; no household is free of it.
May I be free from danger. May I be free from mental suffering. May I be free from physical suffering. May I have ease of well-being.
May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.
“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.
our longing for “perfect” love is normal and desirable; that the wish to merge with a beloved of the soul is the deepest desire of the human heart; that longing is the road to belonging.
And it’s not just about romantic love: We’re visited by this same yearning when we hear “Ode to Joy” or behold Victoria Falls or kneel on a prayer mat.
Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
“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.”
mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by “the pathos of things” and “a sensitivity to impermanence”).
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!
What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet.
We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world.
in Greek myth, Pothos (Longing) was the brother of Himeros (Desire) and the son of Eros (Love).
