Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain
So what if I asked you this same question: “What are you longing for?” You may not have asked yourself this question before. You may not have identified the important symbols in your life story. You may not have examined what they mean. You’ve likely asked other questions: What are my career goals? Do I want marriage and children? Is so and so the right partner? How can I be a good and moral person? What work should I do? To what extent should my work define me? When should I retire? But have you asked yourself these questions in the deepest terms?
Have you asked, What is the thing you long for most, your unique imprint, singular mission, wordless calling? Have you asked where on earth is your closest approximation of home, literally? If you sat down and wrote “home” on a piece of paper and waited a while, what would you write next? And if you have a bittersweet temperament or you’ve come to it by a life experience, have you asked how to hold the melancholy within you? Have you realized that you’re part of a long and storied tradition that can help you transform your pain into beauty, your longing into belonging? Have you asked who is the artist or musician or athlete or entrepreneur or scientist or spiritual leader you love and why do you love them? What do they represent to you? And have you asked what is the ache you can’t get rid of and could you make that your creative offering? Could you find a way to help heal others who suffer a similar trouble? Could you be as Leonard Cohen said, the way you embrace the sun and the moon and do you know the lessons of your own particular sorrows and longings?
Maybe you experience a chasm between who you are and what you do for a living and this tells you that you work too much or too little or that you want fulfilling work or an organizational culture in which you fit or that the work you need has little to do with your official job or income source or countless other messages your yearning might be sending to you. Listen to them. Follow them. Pay attention.
This is not to say that you should abandon your paycheck in favor of a dream… only that you make space for the dream too. Or maybe you’re thrilled when your children laugh but suffer too vicariously when they cry, which tells you that you haven’t truly accepted that tears are part of life and that your kids can handle them. Or maybe you carry the griefs of your parents or grandparents or great-great-great-grandparents maybe your body pays the price of their trouble. Maybe your relationship with the world is compromised by hypervigilance or hair-trigger anger or a dogged dark cloud and you must find a way to transform the pain of the ages, even as you find the freedom to write your own story. Or maybe you mourn your breakups or your dead, which tells you that separation is the most fundamental of heartaches but also that attachments is our deepest desire and that you might transcend your grief when you perceive how connected you are with all the other humans who struggle to transcend theirs and who emerge in fits and starts, bit by rocky bit, just like you.
And maybe you crave perfect and unconditional love, the kind that’s depicted in all those iconic advertisements of a glamorous couple driving their convertible around a bend to nowhere. But maybe you’re also starting to realize that the heart of those ads is not the dazzling couple, but rather the invisible place to which their shiny car is driving — that just around that curve the perfect and beautiful world. But in the meantime, a flame of it is lit inside them and that glimpses of this elusive place are everywhere, not only in our love affairs but also when we kiss our children goodnight, when we shiver with delight at the strum of a guitar, when we read a golden truth expressed by an author who died 1000 years before we were born. And maybe you see that the couple will never arrive and if they do, they won’t get to stay — a situation that has the power to drive us mad with desire…
