Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

So, keep listening to learn how sadness connects us to a sense of transcendence, what upsides come from bittersweet feelings, and why thinking about our impending death can be a good thing.

Before even launching into an introduction, Cain begins her book with a story, well, two stories. In 1992, in Sarajevo, in the middle of a civil war, the cellist Vedran Smailović played Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor" among the bombs and guns. Over time, other musicians joined him.

During that same war, BBC journalist Allan Little was also in Sarajevo, watching a parade of civilians fleeing an attack. One old man approached and spoke to him, seeking his missing wife. When Little asked if he was a Muslim or a Croat, he answered, "I am a musician."

The cellist of Sarajevo, whose story has now been fictionalized in a novel and movie, was giving expression to sadness as his city fell around him – but also creating beauty in its midst. And likewise, the musician that Little met in Sarajevo was claiming his allegiance to something deeper than ethnic divisions.

What is this deeper thing, exactly? Cain wanted to find out.

It led her to the "bittersweet," which she describes as, quote, "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," end quote. She refers to Aristotle, who wondered 2,000 years ago why so many great thinkers, politicians and artists tended toward the melancholy.

She notes that longing, which melancholic types are prone to, is longing for something – that we suffer because we care. She connects this to religious teachings. Mystical texts, from the Qur'an to the writings of St Augustine, have emphasized the importance of longing for the divine as the gateway to transcendence.

Cain calls this sense of transcendence "the perfect and beautiful world" – and there are many avenues to reaching it, especially via a sense of longing. When we experience sorrow, part of us is feeling a missing connection with a world that seems deeper than our everyday one. We can re-establish that connection by engaging constructively with our pain. If we transform our bittersweet feelings into art, healing, love, or other beautiful things, our longing can briefly connect us to that world we're longing for.

Early in the book, there's a "Bittersweet Quiz" for readers to take, so you can find out how inclined you are toward this emotional state. It's brief and entertaining, and the results will probably change if you take it twice. If you don't have a copy of the book, you can take the quiz on Susan Cain's website.

Cain collaborated with Dr David Yaden of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Dr Scott Barry Kaufman of the Center for the Science of Human Potential to develop the Bittersweet Quiz, and the two scientists used it to conduct exploratory pilot studies.

These showed a correlation between high scores on the quiz and high sensitivity – the ability to be absorbed in imaginative experiences, spirituality, and other aspects of human existence.

Have you seen the Pixar movie "Inside Out?" It's one of Cain's case studies in "Bittersweet." In this film, a girl's emotions are personified, and their interactions reflect the events going on in her life.

The director, Pete Docter, originally focused on two of the emotion characters, Joy and Anger. But he realized that Joy had the most to learn from another character, Sadness. Sadness was the key to compassion. It allowed the human characters to understand and connect with one another. And that's what sadness is useful for in real life. If we focus too much on joy, we miss out on this potential for empathy and bonding.

Another cultural example comes from the novel and movie, "The Bridges of Madison County." The main character, Francesca, is in an uninspiring marriage. While her husband and kids are away, she meets a handsome photographer who's come to town for a few days, and they have a passionate affair. While they part ways at the end, that affair sustains both of them creatively for years.

Cain claims that this story's popularity is related to the bittersweet. Romantic love is a culturally-accepted expression of the longing we all experience. And in "The Bridges of Madison County," the two characters give one another a taste of a perfect and beautiful world. This is something that can't be sustained because the longing is not for another person, but for that world, which we only experience in glimpses.

Why do so many of us feel bittersweet when we think about things that are temporary, or experience the end of something important to us? Cain's gateway to those feelings was Leonard Cohen's music. And Cohen's philosophy had a lot to say about this.

He was inspired by the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, which taught that creation used to be a vessel filled with holy light, but it got broken and the shards of divinity were scattered. His songs attempted to capture this brokenness and convey the divinity in it, bringing transcendence to the listener.

We all experience transitions and losses. The key is to handle the bittersweet feelings they bring in a healthy way. Cain interviews Steven Hayes, an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy pioneer, about how to cope with lost love. He recommends accepting it by acknowledging and embracing our feelings. When bittersweetness strikes, it's important to connect with what you really feel, and then and only then, move in a constructive direction while maintaining this connection with your heart.

One model for acting while staying in touch with our sorrow is the wounded healer archetype. In Greek myths, the centaur Chiron's wound from a poison arrow brought him both pain and healing powers. In the real world, a bereaved child might grow up to become a counselor who helps other bereaved people, or a writer who turns their trauma into a book.

Another model that Cain explores is loving-kindness meditation. This practice comes from the Buddhist tradition. It involves wishing yourself well, then sending wishes for well-being to concentric circles of others – first your intimates, then acquaintances, then people you find challenging, and finally, all living beings.

So much for longing and how we can embrace and act on it. But how do we square this with a culture based on different values? Susan Cain is American, and she writes largely from a U.S. context. She's aware of this and signposts it in her book. She's conscious to contrast American attitudes with different cultural views at points. Such as a boyfriend from an unspecified part of Europe, whose high school peers posed with studied pouts for their yearbook, while she and her friends posed with smiles in theirs.

There's a write-up about the intriguingly named Beautiful Business conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where events include a Silent Party, a Funeral March, a keynote about sadness and grief as productive forces in business, and where Fado, the traditional Portuguese music of longing, is performed. Portuguese culture embraces the bittersweet. And Cain refers to spiritual traditions and cultural figures from multiple Asian countries, too, such as the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi and the Japanese haiku master Issa.

Although these glimpses into different cultures are fascinating, they are few and far between. It would have been interesting to see a broader-brush, cross-cultural exploration of these feelings and how they are perceived in different places.

As for the U.S., Cain dives deep into its history to explore how its culture of compulsive positivity evolved. There's a lot of loss underlying American history, not least the loss of land taken from indigenous people, but it all gets swept under the rug. Calvinist immigrants brought their work ethic and emphasis on winning. Cultural forces like the Boy Scouts and self-help culture overemphasized cheerfulness at the expense of other feelings.

What happens when we're expected to win, smile, and be effortlessly perfect? Cain's interviews with Princeton students show that it isn't good for mental health. And it makes us feel alone, believing we're the only ones who experience negative feelings.

Many of us have goals like avoiding heartbreak. As psychologist Susan David says, those are dead people's goals. While we're alive, heartbreak is part of the package deal. And accepting that can be good for our quality of life, and also for business. A 2009 study by management professors found that leaders expressing their sorrow, rather than getting angry can create better leadership outcomes, including closer relationships with followers and a perception of increased effectiveness.

Cain gives a few poignant case studies of leaders who've brought empathy and honesty into the workplace by facing their sorrowful emotions. Shell Oil rig leader Rick Fox is one of them. He brought his team into a program that facilitated personal discussions between colleagues. As they opened up to one another, their accident rate declined by 84 percent.

Whatever our cultural values, there are benefits to be gained from taking a walk on the bittersweet side. And what can be more bittersweet than recognizing that everything ends, that we and everyone we love are going to die someday?

Not so fast, says the life extension movement. One quirky chapter focuses on Cain's experience at a conference where a mixture of scientists, idealists and senior citizens hope to end death, once and for all. It's a great read, and maybe some of us hope for that outcome too. But Cain concludes that our awareness of death is a good thing. And even if we did live forever, we'd still experience longing and sorrow, wouldn't we?

The book explores research on aging and shows that older and younger people make different life choices because of their differing awareness of impermanence. There's also a section on epigenetics research, that suggests that the trauma of our parents and ancestors can be passed down through genetic expression. Whether to the children of Holocaust survivors or to lab mice six generations down.

Sorrow is a big thing. In some contexts, it's the elephant in the room. Susan Cain asks, what do we do about that elephant? Credit goes to her for exploring a difficult and less-than-tangible topic. The perfect and beautiful world isn't a concrete thing. That makes it hard to study and even to describe. But Cain does her best to write about the ephemeral, not in poetry but in nonfiction.

Bittersweet covers such a broad topic that it feels rambling at times. It seems debatable at points if everything belongs in the same book. But all the topics come back to bittersweet emotions in some way.

The biggest challenge is the book's inclusion of online links. Internet references change fast, and it's clunky to open a print book and have to read a hyperlink address and type it into your internet browser. It's even worse when some of those links don't work. Cain mentions a video about empathy in medicine that was taken down from the address given. The video's still on YouTube but it took some searching to find it.

There's also a reference to a quiz from Stanford University that assesses people's views on how much time they have left to live and how they're going to spend it. But the page link, where the quiz is supposedly hosted, does not tell readers where the quiz is, if it's there at all. Cain also promises that you can find certain resources on her website, but most of them aren't there.

Couldn't the publisher have included titles for the videos and web pages instead of, or in addition to, the links? And hopefully, Cain's website will soon upload the missing resources that the book promises.

A few reference faux pas aside, "Bittersweet" is poignant and it's fun. Really? A book about sadness is fun? Why not? Readers accompany Cain as she flies around the world and meets interesting people. And the book goes deep, fulfilling Cain's intention to explore the compelling side of sorrow with an ever-widening scope. If you're philosophically inclined, you might connect with it.

We recommend this book for people who are interested in emotional intelligence. If you're looking to understand and reflect on human feelings, whether they're the feelings of your team at work, loved ones, or your own emotional landscape, Bittersweet will give you a lot to think about. Sadness is not often written about positively, so this is an unusual, insightful and underexplored perspective to bring into the mainstream.

"Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole," by Susan Cain, is published by Viking.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.