Top highlights from Bittersweet
The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it's also the one that can save you. 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.
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Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.
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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.
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If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see itrather than enforced smiles and righteous outrageas the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someones opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
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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. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and deathbitter and sweetare forever paired. Days of honey, days of onion, as an Arabic proverb puts it.
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Its an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.
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Ive concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. Its also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied traditionas dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. Its an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. 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 dont transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans knowor will knowloss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2]
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The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualitiesthe dark as well as the lightis, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.
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Philosophers call this the paradox of tragedy, and theyve puzzled over it for centuries. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow, when the rest of the time well do anything to avoid it?
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Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. Were 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.
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Whatever pain you cant get rid of, make it your creative offering.
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Were built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.
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Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to lifeand it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. Its the state you enter when you cry tears of joywhich tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we arent simply happy: Were also appreciating, even if its not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that were all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. Thats emotional development.
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I dont want my heart to be broken, they say. Or, I dont want to fail. I understand, Susan tells them. But you have dead peoples goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.
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But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We dont actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful thingsthe bitter together with the sweet. We dont thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of Moonlight Sonata, its the yearning for love that were experiencingfragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But its traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms.
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Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, theyve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuseor whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes well feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as I should be over this, Its all my fault, and Life is unfair. Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotionsnot just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept themhas been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.
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Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe. The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success storyand one of the great powers of bittersweetness.
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The Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns found that helping people in need stimulates the same brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal. We also know that depressed (and formerly depressed) people are more likely to see the world from others points of view and to experience compassion; conversely, high-empathy people are more likely than others to enjoy sad music.
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as Jazaieri observes, Theres no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in fact, some data suggests that this type of criticism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them. Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more well do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breathand try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness youd extend to a beloved childliterally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that youd shower on an adorable three-year-old.
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The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundlycare enough to act.
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I love everything about life, Breitbart says, his voice growing louder now. Familial love, parental love, spousal love, lust. I love beauty, I love fashion, I love art, I love music, I love food, I love plays, I love drama, I love poetry, I love movies. There are very few things I dont have an interest in. I love being alive. Hes gesturing widely, at the window, at the pouring, driving rain. But even with all these loves, he says, youre born with a set of limitations: your genetic legacy, your time, your place, your family. I could have been born a Rockefeller, but I wasnt. I could have been born into a family living in a remote tribe where I thought God was a blue elephant, but I wasnt. Youre born into this reality: that life is full of dangers, its an uncertain place. Events occuryou have an accident, someone shoots you, you develop an illness. All sorts of things happen. You have to respond.
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Were most passionate about that which were most denied, and these things manifest in the companies and teams we build. If youve been bullied, your whole life is trying to disprove the peers or family members who once tormented you. If you have deep insecurity, you might hire a lot of yes people.
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But his work implicitly rejects this outlook. 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. Pennebaker found that the writers who thrived after pouring their hearts onto the page tended to use phrases such as Ive learned, It struck me that, I now realize, and I understand. They didnt come to enjoy their misfortunes. But theyd learned to live with insight.
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imagine what death would feel like, they mostly described sadness, fear, and anxiety. But their studies of terminally ill patients and death row inmates found that those actually facing death are more likely to speak of meaning, connection, and love. As the researchers concluded: Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems.
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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.
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the quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.
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But the only thing that consoled them was when we said that the pain of goodbye is part of life; that everyone feels it; that they would feel it again. This would seem a depressing reminder, but it had the opposite effect. When children (especially those growing up in relative comfort) grieve a loss, theyre crying in part because weve unwittingly taught them a delusionthat things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.
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An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others sadnessand even to our own. Your vagus nerve wont fire when you see a child whos starving, says Keltner, if you think youre better than other people. Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need.
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Were living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our tribes. And Keltners work shows us that sadnessSadness, of all things!has the power to create the union between souls that we so desperately lack.
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If youre a naturally bittersweet type, you have a head start; youre constitutionally primed to feel the tug of impermanence. Another way to get there is simply to wait for middle age, which seems to carry some of the psychological benefits of aging without the downsides of your body falling apart.
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the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet.
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But longing is momentum in disguise: Its active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning to grow long, and the German langento reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.
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yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasisa state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range. Studies even show that 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!
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Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys.
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The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. They've been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack. Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asking whether he's seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says. Little hasn't seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldn't mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the man's answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across decades. "I am," said the old man, "a musician.
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I believe its because we intuit that, if pain endures transgenerationally, then so, too, could healing.
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We tend to place compassion on the positive side of the ledger of human emotions, notwithstanding this decidedly bittersweet view of it as the product of shared sorrow.
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What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things cant be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal? she continues. We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; youll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.
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Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings. Your ancestors life ended, and yours could begin. Yours will come to an end, and your childs story will take center stage. Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die offa job will be lost, a relationship will endand, if youre 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 creativityand transcendence.
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the oldest problem, the deepest dreamthe pain of separation, the desire for reunion. Thats the nub of human heartache and desire, regardless of your religion, birth country, personality.
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But for a very long time, even after my life had moved on and even soared, even after I had a home of my own, a family of my own, in so many ways the vibrant life Id dreamed of as a child, even then I couldnt speak of my mother without tears. I couldnt even say a simple thing like my mother grew up in Brooklyn without crying. For this reason, I learned not to speak of her at all. The tears felt unacceptable; it made no sense to grieve a mother who was still alive, even a mother as difficult as mine. But I couldnt accept the chasm between the mother I remembered, whod been my greatest companion, champion, and love, and the one I had now. Yet that childhood motherif shed ever existed in the first placehad walked away with the diaries I handed her on the final day of freshman year, and it was, for all intents and purposes, the last I ever saw of her.
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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.
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whether you long to ease the pain of your ancestors, or for a world in which life could survive without consuming other life; whether you yearn for a lost person, an unborn child, the fountain of youth, or unconditional love: These are all manifestations of the same great ache.
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Were drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because theyre beautiful and healing, but also because theyre a manifestation of love,
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But Keltner also found the compassionate instinct in the more instinctive and evolutionarily ancient parts of our nervous system: in the mammalian region known as the periaqueductal gray, which is located in the center of the brain, and causes mothers to nurture their young; and in an even older, deeper, and more fundamental part of the nervous system known as the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to the neck and torso, and is the largest and one of our most important bundles of nerves. Its long been known that the vagus nerve is connected to digestion, sex, and breathingto the mechanics of being alive. But in several replicated studies, Keltner discovered another of its purposes: When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care. If you see a photo of a man wincing in pain, or a child weeping for her dying grandmother, your vagus nerve will fire.
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Its an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. 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 dont transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans knowor will knowloss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.fn2 This ideaof transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and loveis the heart of this book.
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These findings have enormous implications. They tell us that our impulse to respond to other beings sadness sits in the same location as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies; in the same place as our desire to be rewarded and to enjoy lifes pleasures. They tell us, as Keltner explained to me, that caring is right at the heart of human existence. Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.
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Just like a twenty-one-year-old, Im still full of plans and ideas and excitement. But I have an acute consciousness, which I lacked fifteen years ago, that time is limited. This gives me no anxiety, at least not yet; but it does make me feel as if I should soak everything up while I still can. Carstensen told me that this was typical of midlife.
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The dominant experience is sadness, explains Bonanno, in a podcast interview with Dr. David Van Nuys, and there are also some other emotions.Theres anger, sometimes contempt, or shame, where people are having all kinds of memories and difficult experiences.So rather than this elaborate, steady state of months of deep sadness, its really much more of an in and out kind of an oscillatory state, and this sadness is punctuated at times by positive states and smiling, laughter and connection to other people. For many people, says Bonanno, these periods of sadnessgradually get less intense.
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these phrases to repeat: 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.
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Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, Creative people are not creative when theyre depressed.
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Its that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.
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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. The idea is to wish these states first to yourself, then to an ever-widening circle of people: loved ones, acquaintances, the difficult people in your life, and then finally to all beings.
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Its like a cracked mirror now, Lois says. Something is always missing. The mirror doesnt get put back the way it was, but if you work, you can get a piece of it back.
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Its hard to put into words what I experience when I hear this kind of music. Its technically sad, but what I feel, really, is love: a great tidal outpouring of it. A deep kinship with all the other souls in the world who know the sorrow the music strains to express. Awe at the musicians ability to transform pain into beauty.
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The outlook embedded in these three words does more than connect us in some ineffable fashion. According to Dr. Laura Carstensen, an influential psychology professor who runs the Stanford Life-span Development Laboratory and Stanford Center on Longevity, it also has the power to help us to live in the present, forgive more easily, love more deeply, and experience more gratitude and contentment, and less stress and anger.
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understand theres a hierarchy. I love my students, but I absolutely love my own children more, and I have no interest in training myself away from that. Its too strong.
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Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you, said the ancient Greeks.
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older people have smaller social networks, that theyre unlikely to show up at senior centers for lunch and other social programs that are thought to be good for them, it made sense to her. She remembered how shed felt back in the hospital. Why spend time making new friends when your days are numbered? Wouldnt it be better to seek meaning in the moments and relationships you already have?
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We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what were really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which were forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life neednt eat life in order to survive.
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