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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.
“Days of honey, days of onion,”
Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them.
This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.
And so we lack empathy for those who disagree with us. And so we’re blindsided when our own troubles come.
The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.
“to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
I started writing this book to solve the mystery of why so many of us respond so intensely to sad music. On its face, this seemed a small subject for a years-long project. Yet I couldn’t let it go. I had no idea, then, that the music was just a gateway to a deeper realm, where you notice that the world is sacred and mysterious, enchanted
These losses shape your psyche; they lay down patterns for all your interactions. If you don’t understand them and actively work to form new emotional habits, you’ll act them out again and 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.
You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring.
But metta is an ancient Buddhist practice that has many benefits—from increased feelings of awe, joy, and gratitude, to decreased migraines, chronic pain, and PTSD.
From Dipa Ma, Sharon Salzberg learned the practice of loving-kindness meditation, in which you send out love to yourself, to your loved ones, and to all the people in the world. She also taught her the classic Buddhist story of the mustard seed.
Loss is part of life; no household is free of it. The woman buries her son, and becomes a nun and enlightened.
For Sharon, the simple act of privately wishing people well has a way of changing the way we relate to them, and to the world.
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.
We wish each other love, because we know that love and loss are forever twinned.
“Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”
You will never find again the specific places or people or dreams that you’ve lost.
But you can find something else. You can have momentary glimpses—which may only be glimpses but still they’re momentous—of your own perfect and beautiful vision of the perfect and beautiful world.
There’s no such thing as a soul mate. One person can’t satisfy all your needs. The desire for boundaryless, effortless, endless fulfillment will not only disappoint: It’s neurotic, immature. You should grow up, get over it.
And, therefore, the proper attitude toward novels about transformative four-day romances with National Geographic photographers is not to dismiss them as sentimental nonsense, but to see them for what they really are: equal to, no different from, the music, the waterfall, and the prayer. Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
The New York Times called “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”4 It was the most widely read op-ed of the year, and it argued that we, and our marriages, would be better off if we’d renounce the Romantic idea that, as De Botton put it, “a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.”
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.
There is a traditional trope of laughing at how badly our dates go. We think: ‘I’m a still circle of perfection in a sea of madness.’
In fact, says Alain, 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.”
Rather, the yearning comes first, and exists on its own; romantic love is just one expression of it. It happens to be the manifestation that preoccupies our culture.
But our longing shows up in myriad ways—including the way that I’ve been wondering about all my life: the riddle of why so many of us love sad music.
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”8 to the music than those whose favorites made them happy.
Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it’s sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.
In Hinduism, viraha—the pain of separation, usually from the beloved—is said to be the source of all poetry and music.
Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
“Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”
“Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God,”
‘Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire for love,’ while Rumi expressed the same truth in simple terms, ‘Do not seek for water, be thirsty.’”
But if we embrace the suffering, if we allow it to lead us deep within ourselves, it will take us deeper than any psychological healing.”
Freedom (or nirvana) comes from extinguishing attachment, a process aided by practices such as mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation.
“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.
Love’s feminine quality is ‘I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.’
In the best relationships, you can still, every so often, go to the moon and back.
Maybe for a while, but not forever. We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain, this longing, that can take you there.”
so if we have an “inconsolable longing” that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one.
Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.
Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, he seemed to say, make it your creative offering.
People who work in the arts are eight to ten times more likely than others to suffer mood disorders, according to a 1993 study by the Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison.
how these feelings related to the quantity and quality of the music they composed at the time. Borowiecki found that the artists’ negative emotions were not only correlated with but also predictive of their creative output.
Other studies have found that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases.
We also know that clinical depression—which we might think of as an emotional black hole obliterating all light—kills creativity.
Like what nicotine is in a cigarette, it’s a nicotine delivery system. He was giving you a transcendence delivery system. That’s what he was trying to do every time.”
Yaden has found that it’s precisely during such times—including career changes, divorces, and the ultimate transition of death—that we’re more likely to experience meaning, communion, and transcendence.
