The laws of nature tell us there is no light without dark, no death without birth, and we can't have rainbows without a little rain.
But the world tells us to lean into the positive and forsake sadness and longing, says author Susan Cain.
Her book Quiet sold 4 million copies and made introversion understood and acceptable. Now she wants to do the same thing for feelings that we try to avoid.
Cain says taking comfort in uncomfortable emotions is a quiet force that feeds creativity, gratitude, and connection.
Susan Cain. Photo:
Cain's new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole started off as a quest to understand why we could love something sorrowful, she tells Jesse Mulligan.
Photo: supplied
“At first, I just wanted to understand why that sad minor key Leonard Cohen-esque music could make us feel so, not really happy that’s not the right word, but I guess feel so good, so much love and connection, and having a sense of transcendence that you don’t get from happy music.
“In fact, researchers have found that it is reliably the sad songs that give us the chills and the goosebumps.”
It’s part of our nature as humans to have a spiritual longing for a more perfect and beautiful world, she says.
“We now lack a language for that because we only speak the language of atheists and believers, and there are fewer believers every day.
“You see this manifested in all the religions, the longing for the Garden of Eden, and Mecca, and Zion and Beloved of the Soul and then we see it in the longing for Somewhere Over The Rainbow and The Wizard Of Oz.
“This is part of our DNA and when we get in touch with it, we feel a little more alive.”
If we can find joy within this longing, then we feel that ‘bittersweetness’ (referenced in her book title), she says.
“It’s about the recognition that in this world, joy and sorrow travel together, that light comes from dark, that everyone and everything we love best is only here for a little while.
“And that somehow with that recognition comes a deep sense of joy at the beauty of the world, and a kind of wellspring of creativity and connection and a sense of transcendence.
“We’re living in a culture that tells us, well don’t talk about any of that, there’s something kind of distasteful about that or maybe something dangerous because if you follow that line of thinking too far you end up with a case of clinical depression.”
- Take Susan Cain's 'bittersweet' quiz here (developed with two psychologists and also available in the book)
America’s culture of what she describes in another interview as “ruthless positivity” created a sense of fear of talking about the realities of life, she says.
“You can trace it all the way back but especially in the 19th century in this country as things became more and more focused on business, there became more and more the question of ‘who is a success and who a failure and why?’
“Whereas earlier people had thought that if you suffered setback it was probably because the gods of misfortune had frowned upon you, now it came to be seen that if something went wrong it was because there was something wrong with you.
“We started to think of people as either winners or losers and the more you become afraid of being a loser, the less you want to have anything to do with loss or sorrow or longing or any of these states of being, you don’t even want to acknowledge that they’re there because it feels too dangerous.”
Just as with introversion, melancholy is often misunderstood within psychology, she says.
“In fact, if you type the very word melancholy into your psychology database … you pull up a whole bunch of articles about clinical depression.
“The difference between melancholy and depression, it’s a difference in degree probably rather than a difference in kind, but that difference in degree is quite significant.
“Clinical depression is a source of despair and numbness and a kind of emotional black hole, whereas the state of melancholy … is much richer and it’s a place where you feel connected to the ecstasies of the universe.
“So these states are cousins of each other, but they take you to completely different destinations.”
After the loss of her brother and father, she says she was initially overwhelmed by grief but found solace after reading a metaphor about life from Kabbalah.
“The way the metaphor goes is that all of creation was originally one intact divine vessel but at some point, the vessel broke and the world we’re living in now is the world after the breakage.
“But the thing we can do is to bend down and pick up those pieces of light.
“My father had been so focused in his life on the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, like he was a person who fell in love with orchids so he built a greenhouse of orchids in the basement, and he fell in love with the French language so he learnt to speak French fluently.
“It just helped me to understand that the beauty he loved is still everywhere around me, and in me and part of me.”
