April 25, 2025 • 51 mins
In this episode, Susan Cain explores the bittersweet truth about beauty, sorrow, and what makes life worth living. She emphasizes the transformative power of music and bittersweet emotions and also discusses how acknowledging grief can lead to deeper connections and creativity. This episode encourages listeners to embrace their emotions and seek beauty in life’s bittersweet moments, offering profound insights into the human experience.
Key Takeaways:
- Exploration of the relationship between sorrow and beauty.
- Discussion of the transformative power of music and its emotional connections.
- Insights into the concept of bittersweetness and its significance in human experience.
- The importance of acknowledging grief and its role in personal growth.
- Differentiation between “moving on” and “moving forward” in the context of loss.
- The concept of poignancy as a blend of joy and sorrow.
- The role of creativity and art in navigating difficult emotions.
- Emphasis on seeking beauty in everyday life, especially during challenging times.
- The impact of personal experiences on understanding grief and longing.
- Encouragement for listeners to embrace their emotions and foster connections through shared experiences.
If you enjoyed this conversation with Susan Cain, check out these other episodes:
Life Transitions with Bruce Feiler
The Longings of our Heart with Sue Monk Kidd
For full show notes, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey friends, Eric here with some exciting news. I've been
writing a book and it's about to be out in
the world in April of twenty twenty six. The working
title is How a Little Becomes a Lot, and it's
all about how small, consistent actions, the kind that we
talk about all the time on this show can lead
to real meaningful change. Right now, the book is in
(00:21):
the editing process and there's still some shaping to do,
which is where you come in. I'd love your input
on what to focus on, how to talk about the book,
even what it should be called. If you've got a
few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make
this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful
to hear them. Just head to oneufeed dot net slash
(00:43):
book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways, and
to behind the scenes look at what it actually takes
to make a book. Editing marathons, title debates, existential spirals,
and me questioning all of my life choices at two
am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's oneufeed dot net
slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part
(01:06):
of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Truly, the same thing that can, when it's not working
right predispose us to anxiety and depression is the very
thing that can bring us to our highest and deepest selves.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(01:49):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our action matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(02:10):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
It's technically sad music, but what I feel really is love.
A great title outpouring of it. I've never had a
good answer for why I find yearning music so strangely
uplifting until this conversation. This week, I talk with Susan Kine,
author of bittersweet and quiet about the strange alchemy where
(02:36):
sorrow becomes beauty and longing becomes connection. We dig into
why certain types of music make our hearts ache in
the best way, and why that ache might actually be
pointing us towards something sacred. Some spiritual traditions can seem
to treat desire and longing like enemies. This conversation offers
a different view that yearning can be a spiritual force
(02:59):
in its own right. Susan also holds a special place
in my heart, not just because of her work, but
because she kindly introduced me to her literary agent who
later became mine. Susan and I talk Leonard Cohen, grief,
transcendence and how turning towards the bitter sweet might just
be the path home. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is
(03:20):
the one you feed. Hi, Susan, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Hey, Eric, it's so great to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
I'm really excited to have you on. You're sort of
a patron saint to introverts everywhere, of which I lean
in that direction. And your latest book, where we're going
to be spending our time, is called Bitter Sweet. How
sorrow and longing make us whole. But before we do that,
let's start, like we always do, with a parable. In
the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild
(03:46):
and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of
us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf,
which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
the others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops, thinks about it
for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
(04:06):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you and your life and the.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Work that you do. So I love that parable, and
it actually seems to me to echo another parable that
I came across while I was researching Bittersweet, which I
have found to be such a great guiding star and
consolation of how to live. And I'll tell you this parable,
(04:32):
and I think you'll see the parallels, but we can
talk about them. So in this other parable, this one
comes from the Kabbalah, which is the mystic form of Judaism.
And in this parable, the idea is that all of
creation originally was an intact divine vessel, but that the
vessel shattered, and that the world that we are living
(04:55):
in now is the broken world following the shattering, but
that scattered all around us still are the divine shards
from when the vessel was still intact, And that one
great way to live a life is to look around
us and to notice the divine shards wherever they have
(05:17):
happened to land around us, and to bend down and
pick them up. And you will notice different shards from
the ones that I will. But we can all do
our own gathering. And I love this and it reminds
me of the parable that you shared, because it's acknowledging
the pain and the tragedy and the evil that exists
(05:37):
in the world without feeling that we have to become
a prisoner to them. So it's not telling us to
look away from them and pretend that they're not there,
which is I think what our mainstream culture would tell us.
It's telling us they're very much there, and we can
admit that and tell the truth about that. And at
the same time we can turn in the other direction,
in the direction of beauty and of love, and that
(05:59):
we have the ability to decide to turn in that direction.
I find that parable to just be such a relief
or a leief to be able to tell the truth.
Also just a great way to live, to know that
we always have that option. So I think it's very
much with the grandparent in your parable was telling the grandchild,
just with a different image.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, It's one of the things I love about the
Wolf parable is exactly what you said, which is it
just sort of says like, hey, we all have this
in us. That's the human condition. It's natural, it's normal.
I've always liked that normalizing of it. And I love
the parable that you told from Judaism, which is a beautiful,
beautiful story. And as you were talking about it, I
actually had another thought, which was, not only are we
(06:39):
walking around collecting the shards, we are ourselves the shards
in some ways, and when we come together, we are
putting them back together in a way. That sort of
flashed into my mind as you were telling that story.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And I think that what their grandparent
was saying also is that we can't deny that these
two aspects of ourselves exist at all times. With denying
it comes a kind of blindness, but we can acknowledge
it and then decide to turn in a particular direction.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Let's jump into the book. I mean, I kind of
have to start close to where you start, which is
by talking about music, and you start the book by
really trying to find out why do some of us
really love what would be considered sad music. And it's funny,
this is an interesting thing in my own household because
I am that type. I listened to melancholy music. Give
(07:32):
me any chance, and I'll listen to it. My partner
really doesn't because it makes her sad. And I haven't
been able to explain to her why I like melancholy
music very well. I haven't been able to put it
into very good words. I was reading your book and
I just stopped and I said, I have to read
you something, which is rare. I normally just interview prep
and she's always like, I wish you'd share more about
(07:52):
what you're interview prepping. And I just am kind of
going on my way, but it was so good it
stopped me and I'm just going to read it really quickly,
if that's okay. Yeah, sure, you said it's hard to
put into words what I experience when I hear this
kind of music. It's technically sad, but what I feel
really is love, a great title outpouring of it, a
deep kinship with all the other souls in the world
(08:13):
who know the sorrow the music strains to express. But
the music makes my heart open, literally the sensation of
expanding chest muscles. And I've been looking for that description
ever since I started listening to melancholy music. So thank you,
You're welcome.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I just got goosebumps knowing that you've been looking for
that explanation as I had been too. I mean, it
was only when I started writing this book that I
actually like put into words exactly what the sensation is
and why it matters so much. The reason I put
music at the heart of the book, I mean, partly
just because it literally was the catalyst for why I
went off on this bittersweet quest in the first place,
(08:49):
but also because the way in which sad music is
a gateway to love, because it unites us in our
state of longing, our state of like exile from Eden.
You could say that's the power of bittersweetness itself, not
just the music, but the bittersweet condition itself, Like the
fact that all humans are united in existing in this
(09:12):
state of what feels to us like a grand imperfection
and impermanence, and you know, longing for the world to
be different from the way that it is. You know,
to see the joys and the beauties in the world
and wish that they could last forever, and wish that
they comprised all of the world instead of only a
part of it. All those longings. The fact that we're
in that together is just this great uniting force. And
(09:37):
the fact that we live in a world that tells
us not to talk about any of that and not
to talk about our sorrows and our longings is like
living in a world that is telling us not to
love each other as deeply as we could.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, and I really want to get to what you
just said a little bit more in detail, which is
about telling us not to love things as deeply as
we do, because not only does our cul tell us
that some of the spiritual traditions I'm most attached to
almost seem to be saying that. But we're going to
save that for a little bit later because we got
to talk about Leonard Cohen for a second. Who you
(10:12):
talk about as your favorite musician and is mine. He
was the guest I most ever all time, wanted to
have on this show, and it didn't happen. I got close.
At one point, I was talking with a guy who
knew him, who was a monk at the center that
Leonard was at, and he said, you should know that
Leonard's monk name means great silence, so just to give
(10:32):
you an idea of how likely you are to get
a conversation with him.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So that's so interesting, And can I interrupt you to
just say that, yeah, he's my guy artistically. After my
book Quiet came out, you know, which is all about
introversion and the power of quiet, he actually tweeted out
of the blue about the book and about Quiet and
how important it is. Oh wow, like a glory day
for me. And I can't believe I can't find the
tweet now, but I will always remember it, so yeah, yeah,
(11:00):
so I just had to share.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
That I remember where I was when I heard that
he passed. I wanted to talk a little bit about
a conversation I think Adam Cohen was saying in an
interview with Rick Rubin, but I loved this line at
the end he's describing what Leonard Cohen's music did, and
Adam his sun said he was giving you a transcendence
delivery system. That's what he was trying to do every time.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I don't have the
quote in front of me, but I think he was
talking about that in the context of talking about how,
you know, his music was famously kind of sorrowful and gloomy,
and his record producers at one point were joking about
how they should give out razor blades along with his
along with his albums, and you know, and that's what
he was famous for. But what Adam was saying is yes,
(11:46):
and I mean it wasn't only about brokenness. It was
about brokenness pointing in the direction of transcendence. The song
that is best known of his and has been covered
maybe more than any other song music history, is Hallelujah.
And Hallelujah is about I mean, it's literally in his words,
it is about the broken Hallelujah, a cold and broken Hallelujah.
(12:09):
So I think in all his music he's constantly expressing
and wrestling with the bittersweet, the way in which everything
is so fundamentally broken and so fundamentally beautiful.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, I agree. So there's one other thing I
would just want to talk about with music for a second,
something else that you said that I really love. You
said this type of music. You're talking about a specific song,
but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Don't simply discharge your emotions, they elevate them. And also
you say it's only sad music that elicits exalted states
of communion, and awe, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
This is an interesting thing. I did a little bit
of research and studying of the whole nature of sad
music and why we love it so. And you and
I are not the only ones who feel this way. Many,
many people do. The people whose favorite songs are happy
listen to them one hundred and seventy five times on
their playlist. But the people whose favorite songs are sad
listen eight hundred times. And they tell, yeah, you know,
(13:06):
they feel this deep sense of connection, And they tell
researchers that the music makes them feel connected to the
sublime and the wondrous. And it's not just because of
quote negativity per se, because this does not happen for
music that expresses anger or disgust or you know, any
other negative emotions you can think of. It's specifically something
(13:29):
about sadness. And in fact, there was this one study
done by an MIT economist. It was published in an
MIT review under the title how are you, my dearest Mozart?
And in this study, the economist he took all the
letters that Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt had written throughout their lives,
(13:51):
and he coded each of the letters based on the
emotions expressed within them, and then he correlated the time
at which those letters had been written and look at
what music the composer had produced at that time. And
he found that the most and the only predictive emotion
of all was sadness. That when the letters expressed sorrow,
(14:12):
that was what reliably predicted the most profound and the
greatest of their works. And again, not any other negative emotion,
just sadness, just sorrow. So there's something about this state
of sorrow. And I think anybody who feels a kind
of creative spirit in them we all know this, We've
been there. There's something about a state of sorrow that
(14:32):
puts us in mind of a kind of like longing
and reaching upwards, wanting to transform the sorrow into something else.
Into something high, into something sublime.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I think that's really fascinating that sorrow is the emotion that,
as you say, it can sort of lead us to
these higher states of transcendence, of awe, of beauty. It's
not the other negative emotions. And it made me think
a little bit about the idea of neuro right, neurosis
being very often something we're layering on top of to
(15:05):
avoid feeling maybe the core emotion, which might be sorrow.
And so these sort of more neurotic emotions, that's, for
lack of a better word, I'm going to use them
anxiety or depression. I'm a depression sufferer. We'll talk about that,
that these things actually are ways of avoiding what is
actually most healing in some ways.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And it's interesting that
you use the word neurosis because one of the things
I did when I started researching this book, I basically
was researching for years what I call the bittersweet tradition,
which is all the religions, wisdom traditions, artists, philosophers, poets
who have been talking about this bittersweet state of being
(15:45):
for thousands of years all across the world, and I
looked also at mainstream psychology. In mainstream psychology, there really
is no word for this state, the state of like
this beautifully piercing longing that I was trying to investigate.
The only word that comes close is the word of neurosis,
as you said, except when psychology talks about neurosis, it's
(16:07):
only talking about the problem of it. It is a
real problem when it goes too far and it descends
into anxiety and depression, and for anyone who's been there
that those are not pleasant states. But there's nothing in
psychology or in this terminology that talks about the great
(16:27):
transcendent longing that's at the heart of human nature, and
that is intimately connected. The same thing that can when
it's not working right predispose us to anxiety and depression
is the very thing that can bring us to our
highest and deepest selves. And so a lot of the
(16:47):
chalent of life is figuring out what to do with
that thing and how to use its powers, its powers
which can be dangerous but which can also be beautiful
and transformative.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
You wrote this idea of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence
and love is at the heart of this book. And
when I read that. I was like, that's as good
a description of what we've been trying to do over
five hundred episodes, right, which is, you know, I'm a
recovering addict, I have depression. You know. My whole thing is,
how do we take this difficult stuff that we all
face every human life? You know, Buddhist says we're all
(17:20):
brothers and sisters in sickness, old age, and death right,
So for all of us, how do we take that, yeah,
and create something meaningful and beautiful exactly?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
You know, in the book, I have this quiz that
we developed. It's called the Bittersweet Quiz. I say wee
because I did it together with the psychologists David Aiden
and Scott Barry Kaufman. David Aiden's at Hopkins, and the
quiz basically asks a bunch of different questions, questions like
do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day?
Do you react very intensely to music our nature? And
(17:51):
there's a bunch of questions. You can find it either
in the book or on my website. And what we
found is that people who score high on the quiz,
meaning that they tend to this bitter sweet state of mind,
These same people. They have maybe exactly what you would
predict in terms of strength and vulnerabilities. Their strengths are
(18:12):
that they also score high end measures of receptivity to
wonder and awe and spirituality. And that was a strong correlation.
But then there is also a more minor but still
significant correlation with anxiety and depression. It's like the quiz codified.
I think what you just said and what we've both
been reaching towards, which is, there is something in this
(18:34):
bitter sweet state, this state in which you're aware of
life's joys and sorrows, and you're aware of its impermanence,
and you're deeply connected to that and connected to its beauty.
There's something about that state that, if you're following it
and you're in your best self moment, let's say, it
can deliver you to states of great wonder, and if
(18:56):
you're not careful to manage it right, it can also
deliver you to a place the depression. The question is
how do you do it right?
Speaker 1 (19:28):
I've asked that question I feel like hundreds of different ways,
which is, why do some people take pain and turn
it into something beautiful? And I don't only mean art right,
It could be it could just be loved. It becomes
a creative force in their life. And I would say,
a good thing in the world. Why does that happen
in some cases? And in other cases we see people
(19:50):
just broken by the difficulties in life, you know, And
so what are the factors in there? And you in
the book later on say there's different pathways to the
piece we all seek. You're trying to sort of answer
this question, at least it seems to me. And I'm
just going to read the four that you came up
with and let you kind of talk about them. First
(20:10):
one was sort of, you know, let it go, some
degree of you know, just letting things go. The other
is to know how resilient we are, to really lean
into resilience. The other is non attachment, right, and trying
to aspire to a love that is bigger than possession.
And then the last one, you say, this is the
(20:30):
one you're going to need to explain, is the way
of even so carries a different wisdom, one that expresses
the longing that many of his sense is the force
that will carry us home.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah. So that last one comes from a poem that
was written by Issa. One of the great Japanese Buddhist poets,
and it was written after he lost his beloved young
daughter to smallpox, and he says in the poem, basically
he says, I know that this world do do like
(21:01):
dw I know that this world of do is just
a world of do. But even so, but even so,
and he's basically saying, you know, I get it that
everything is impermanent. I get it that we're just dewdrops
who we're all of us going to evaporate any minute. Now.
I understand that. And yet there's something in me that
doesn't accept that. There's something in me that will insist
(21:24):
on feeling sorrow and feeling grief for my lost daughter
no matter what. And I think there's so much beauty
and wisdom in that poem. He's a trained Buddhist. He's saying,
even I feel this way, and implicit in the poem
because there's a reader at the other end of that poem,
and he knows it. He's not writing it to himself,
(21:44):
so implicit is there's a reader on the other end
who feels the exact same way, who, no matter what,
will feel a grief and feel a longing, and that
we are united in that feeling, and there's something about
the uniting of that, the fact that all humans are
in that state together, that is a great joy of
its own. There's one young woman who I quote in
(22:06):
the book who calls this the union between souls, and
she's talking about how she experiences that at her grandfather's funeral.
At the funeral, there's a barbershop chorus who sings a
song in tribute of her grandfather, and she sees her
father for the first time in her life, crying in
front of her, crying in public. And she says, what
(22:27):
she remembers of that funeral is not the sorrow, but
the union between souls that happen there. And I think
that's what is bringing to life when he says, I
may be a Buddhist, and I may understand it about
the two drops, but come on, we're all in this together.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I love that idea. You say, this is the ultimate paradox.
We transcend grief only when we realize that we're connected
with all the other humans who can't transcend grief, because
we will always say but even so, even so, what
I love about that poem, and I've tried to articulate
this and listen, have heard this before. I try to
articulate and talk about an experience I had when I
(23:05):
had to put to sleep a dog that I love
deeply beyond all measure, and I had had to put
down another dog like eight months before, And for whatever reason,
I was able to sort of like say, you know what, Yep,
this is a world of do. It's a world of do.
We come, we go as creatures, we get sick, we die.
(23:25):
This is what happens. So I sort of set down
my argument with the universe, and I just was able
to descend into the grief itself, and it felt beautiful.
It was so clear to me that that grief was
the parallel, the other side of the great love. You know,
I was having great grief because I'd had great love.
But in order to do that, I feel like I
(23:48):
had to set down my defense against it. I had
to sit down the but it shouldn't have happened. He's
too young. But I just had to put down another
dog eight months ago. All my arguments with the universe,
you said. But even so, even knowing all that, really sad,
and yet there was a deep beauty in it that
I had not experienced in other grieving situations where I
(24:10):
had sort of grieved and argued my way through them.
I don't know if that resonates with you.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, absolutely, thank you for sharing that story. Yeah, it does,
it does. I think there's something about setting aside our
griefs too soon. Maybe that feels not human and deprives
us of the process the way it is even for
somebody who does get through grief with a great measure
(24:36):
of resilience. And you know, as I write in the book,
the Columbia psychologist George Bonano, who studies grief, has found
that the vast majority of us I don't surprise ourselves
by how resilient we end up being in the face
of grief. It's not true for everybody. Some people really
get into chronic grief, but many, many people are more
(24:56):
resilient than they expect to be. But that doesn't mean
they don't pass through the moments of feeling it so
incredibly intensely. And it doesn't mean they might not feel it.
You know, fifty years from now, fifty years from the
day they've lost their beloved, it can come up upon
them unawares. So all of that is part of the
same MESSI soup I agree.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I think there's this idea that is in certain circles,
and your book is part of this, which beautifully says, hey,
difficult experiences can become really beautiful things, and we hear
that and we buy into that, and yet they're still
brutal when you're in them. They're still like, that's a
(25:36):
lovely idea. I find it helpful to hold a kernel
of it in my mind some of the time when
I'm in the darkness, like, Okay, yeah, this is transforming,
but you still got to go through it, and it
is not pleasant at certain moments, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Absolutely. And I also want to take a minute to
acknowledge that I think there are for some people, some
griefs and some traumas that are so enormal and so
horrible and so beyond what any human should be exposed
to that maybe you don't ever get to that place,
or maybe you only get to glimpses of that place.
And I'm thinking, in particular, there's someone I've come to
(26:12):
know over the years who as a child was just
exposed to such a heart wrenching and horrible degree of
abuse that you just can't even imagine. Well, I guess
you can say two things about him now as a
grown adult. One is that his life is forever marred
in a very deep way. I'm in touch with him
every day. I don't think I've seen him go through
(26:33):
a single day without suffering emotionally as a result of
what happened to him as a child. It's also the
case that he has an incredibly loving soul who writes
poetry every day and does great acts of love for
the people around him almost every day. And so both
of these things are true at once. But I'm invoking
(26:55):
him to say, I don't think it's easy, and I
do wonder if there are some degree of grief and
trauma beyond which maybe a full healing isn't possible. To me,
the jury's out on that question.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I agree, I agree one hundred percent. I believe some
degree of healing is always possible, but how much is
up in the eye. I wonder about this a lot,
you know, being a recovering addict and alcoholic, this is
a question I think about a lot, which is, we
know that trauma is a huge indicator for addiction, and
we know the more traumatic experiences you've had, the higher
(27:29):
that relationship really is. And so we see some people
who get sober and you're like, well, my god, what
they went through was just I can't fathom, you know,
And yet they get sober, And then you see other
people that don't, even with much less trauma. So I
think this sort of healing process, to me, it's deeply mysterious.
One of my great mysteries of my adult life has
(27:51):
always been why do some of us get sober and
others don't? And for every answer I give, I can
find people that contradict whatever answer I come up with,
and I'm left with a mystery. Yeah, I don't think
we can fully articulate something as complex as healing, and
the world is deeply complex. And I think that's what
The Bitter Sweet to Me also takes into account. There's
(28:11):
some measure in it to me of this is all
deeply mysterious, and that that mystery can be deeply both
terrifying but also deeply beautiful.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, that's right. You know how in the book I
give different examples of people who have been engaging with
the Bittersweet tradition all over the world, and one of
them is the poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, and he calls
the longing aspect of the bitter sweet, like that mysterious
longing that so many of us feel. He calls it
the great force that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain. Hmmm,
(28:45):
and I think that really embodies the mystery that you're
talking about.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, in the bitter Sweet tradition, you actually say what
I call the bitter sweet is a tendency to states
of longing, poignancy and sorrow, and acute awareness of passing time,
and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.
So I thought, for a minute, we could talk about
those states individually. We've talked a little bit about sorrow,
so I don't know if we need to go back
(29:09):
to sorrow. Maybe we'll land there. It seems to be
where I often even without meaning too. No, I'm joking
sort of. But let's talk about longing, because this is
a really interesting one, because I've seen longing as a
deeply beautiful thing, and yet, as somebody who studied a
(29:29):
lot in Buddhism, we're also told to watch out for craving.
And you stumble right into this in the book and
talk about it. So I really wanted to talk about
that for a little while, because I think that is
such a big and confusing sort of distinction.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, I agree with you, of course. And there is
a state of longing, a state of yearning that exists
across all the traditions. Right there's the longing for the
garden of Eden, and the longing for Mecca, the longing
to be united with God, the longing for somewhere over
the rainbow, you know. In Homer's Odyssey, like that's a
(30:09):
story of epic adventure, that's the way we think of it,
but really that's a story of Ulysses longing for home.
The adventure happened because he was filled with homesickness for
his native Ithaca that he hadn't seen, I think for
seventeen years or something like that. And he's weeping on
a beach with homesickness, and that's what sets him off
(30:29):
on the journey that ultimately brings him home. But this
idea of you know, I'm a poor wayfaring stranger longing
for that world of home, there is something about that,
this longing for home, this ultimate home, whether we think
of it explicitly in terms of the divine or more
metaphorically in terms of like longing for perfect union, perfect love,
(30:52):
that is central to what human beings are, that is
central to who we are. We are creatures who long
for an ultimate union and long for an ultimate home,
and we come into this world crying, as psychoanalyst would say, well,
it's because we left the womb. But going more deeply
(31:12):
the womb is the representation of that ultimate home for
which we long. And so many of the great theologians
and mystics have taught across all the traditions that we
should go deeper into the longing because it's the longing
itself that brings us closer to that for which we long.
Remi says that he's talking about God or Allah. He's saying,
(31:33):
the longing you express is the return message from the
divine that you seek. The grief you cry out from
is what draws you towards union. Your pure sadness that
wants help, that is the secret cup. So all these traditions,
and particularly the Sufi tradition, which is the mystic side
of Islam, all these traditions speak of this divine nature
(31:54):
of longing. And as soon as I started learning about
all this and diving into these traditions, I felt like
a kind of homecoming because I felt like, oh my gosh,
you know, this is what I have been experiencing all
my life and never really understood what it was. But then,
like you, I had this big question of like, I mean,
I'm not an expert in Buddhism, but I know something
about it and the way that Buddhism warns us against craving.
(32:18):
And I thought, well, how do these teachings about the
you could call it divine nature of longing. How do
these teachings square with Buddhism's warning against giving into craving.
So I went to ask a Sufi teacher about this. Actually,
this is llewell and von Lee, the great Sufi teacher
who's based in California, And I asked him this very
question at a retreat that he gave the difference between
longing and Sufhism and Buddhism, and he says, longing is
(32:42):
different from craving. Longing is the craving of the soul
you want to go home. He says, in our culture
it's confused with depression, and it's not depression. There's a
saying in Sufhism. Sufhism was at first heartache. Only later
it became something to write about. And then he said
to me, if you're taken by longing, live it. You
(33:04):
can't go wrong. If you're going to go to God,
go with sweet sorrow in the soul. And I say
all this as an agnostic myself, and yet like, there's
such a deep truth in this message, and one that
I think coexists with the exhortation against craving, because this
longing that we're talking about is more about a longing
for everything that is good and true and beautiful and love.
(33:29):
And where's the harm in that?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I think that we find this paradox right in the
center of Buddhism. I know I've talked about it with
many Buddhist teachers, which is this idea of why are
we even practicing if we don't want something, Like, what
are we doing if there's not some desire, Like we're
not sitting around meditating for no reason. We're doing it
because there's something that we are after we want. And
(34:27):
even the Buddha talks about you know, great determination. Determination
comes when you're like, well, there's something I want and
I'm determined to get it. So I think that even
within Buddhism, we sort of just have to sit with
this paradox that says, yeah, there are some things that
we want, and that longing is okay. I love the
way Houston Smith in his book The Great World Religions,
(34:48):
it's a classic, but he talks about Hinduism and he
paraphrases this, So I want to make sure I'm saying
that it's what he said, not what Hinduism said. But
he said about Hinduism that basically what Hinduism is saying
is your desire is great, you just are desiring the
wrong things. It's not strong enough, it's not big enough,
and that that's the normal path through life. That when
(35:11):
we're younger, we desire the things of the world, and
that's natural and normal, and as we grow old, we
start to go, wait, there's something more. The things of
the world aren't satisfying, So what is this bigger thing?
So I just love this question because it's another one
of the things that I feel like has been central
to what I've asked people on this show for five
hundred episodes, which is this longing seems clear, it seems real,
(35:36):
it seems true, it seems innate to human nature, and
it feels right. And we also know that craving over
attachment causes a great deal of suffering, and so trying
to balance that paradox, I think is really important work.
It's kind of similar to like trying to balance that
thin line of Okay, I'm going to turn difficulty and
sorrow into beauty or I'm going to fall off the
(35:58):
other side.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. That's
a great way of putting it. Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, do you think that the idea of saying
that what we're all ultimately longing for is love, by
which I don't mean like a new relationship kind of love.
I mean, like like love if that's something that unites
all the different religious traditions, including Buddhism. Yeah, I mean
(36:20):
Buddhism would say I love without attachment.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah. Yeah, I've always loved the Joseph Campbell quote around
you know that we're not looking for the meaning of life,
We're looking for the feeling of being alive. Yeah, you know, yeah,
we could call that love, we could call that transcendence,
we could call it connection. You know, when I think
about spirituality, and I've got a course called spiritual habits. Right.
So it's a word I use when I think about
(36:44):
what it means most deeply. It just to me is
about connection to what matters. That's going to be different
for everybody, but it's about connection to what matters, and
so you know, the words we use might be different,
but I do think that that's what we're after. And
as we're talking, I'm thinking about early days of Alcoholics
Anonymous and Bill Wilson was the founder and he got
into a correspondence via letters with Carl Jung and Young
(37:09):
made the connection that said, you know, what alcoholics are
after is an experience of the transcendent. It's in the
word spirit spirit us. You know we call alcohol spirits.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
That's what's being chased, absent, and the only thing that's
going to be a cure for that is something that
addresses that need, which is why AA became a spiritual program,
very religious in its early leanings, and it's diversified, but
it's pointing to that same thing, that there's some connection
we need to something that's more than us and our
(37:42):
little wants.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Absolutely, Oh my gosh, that's so true. You know, it's
funny as you say that. So I wrote most of
my first book Quiet in this amazing, beautiful little cafe
in Greenwich Village no longer exists, but it was called Doma,
and don't I had this magical spirit about it, and
it drew artists and writers and actors from all over
(38:05):
the city. They would come and hang out there and
work on their stuff and have conversations. It was such
a magical place. I hung out there all the time
for a number of years, and once or twice a
week I would notice there was this group of people
who would come in the evening to Doma and they
would sit together and talk. And I always noticed them
because they seemed so alive and so full of spirit,
(38:29):
and I wondered where they came from. And then at
a certain point someone told me, Oh, there's an AA
group that meets down the block, and this group is
coming from there. And it was such a striking group
of people, like you just noticed, as I say, you
notice them immediately, and they had a kind of magical
property about them, like even more than the usual denizens
of Doma.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it can have that effect. And I
think the other thing you talk about in the book
is that sometimes the things that lead us most commonly
to transcend and exalted experiences is difficulty, sadness, a understanding
that life is finite, you know. And I think a
lot of people, particularly early on in AA. I mean,
(39:07):
I was so close to death when I came in,
you know, as a heroin Addict, that I was just
so aware of it that it made life sort of
glow in a different way. Sometimes I wish I could
recapture that, you know, a little bit more with the
emotional maturity I have now and the spiritual energy I
had then would be perfect. Oh.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Interesting, interesting, Yeah, And I mean there are all those
studies that I talk about in the books, like David
Yaiden Johns Hopkins, that guy who I developed the Bittersweet
Quiz with. He's done studies where he has tried to
track what are the conditions that cause people to experience
the great, spiritual and transcendent moments of their lives, and
(39:46):
he's found that one of the most reliable ones is
being at moments of transition, including moments of great loss,
including approaching death. And other studies that have found that
if you ask people to imagine, what are the emotion
that they would feel upon approaching deaths, like people assume
the emotions would be, you know, like feel depressed and
(40:06):
angry and like that, But when you talk to people
who are actually dying, it's nothing like that. They're reporting
much more uplifted and much more spiritual emotions a lot
of the time. So there is something about being open
to these states of transition. Those are some of our
great gateway moments, even the transitions that feel really difficult
and that feel as if they're full of loss.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
It certainly has been the case for me. Transitions of
all different sorts have been big moments, and most of
them have been ones that I wouldn't have chosen.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yes, exactly exactly. You never choose it. You never choose it.
This is a very innocuous one, or a very mild one.
But I went through an experience like this a little bit.
Just this past summer, my two sons went to Sleepway
camp for the first time. Like my husband and I
really have devoted everything, you know, to our kids over
(40:58):
these years, and suddenly they weren't home, and we knew
they weren't going to be home again for the rest
of the summer, and that, you know, and of itself
was a kind of like foretelling of them going away
to college and growing up and all the rest of it.
And the first day or so, I just felt such
a blue feeling, you know, like a blue sense of loss.
And then life went forward and I don't know, my
(41:20):
husband and I we went to the beach, just the
two of us for the first time in so long,
and it was such an incredible experience, and it was
like a kind of second honeymoon, like we had only
just met and at the same time that we had
known each other all our lives. It was just this
great thing that would not have happened but for passing
through that blue moment of transition.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I mean that's a real one that children going away,
as you mentioned in a small way summer camp and
then the big way in college, like that is a
big thing for people. That emptiness, to me is a
really real thing and it can be very difficult, but
it's also very fertile, as you sort of found. Just
used a word in there that brings me to something
(42:02):
else I wanted to talk about with you, because you
talk about the author Nora mcernie. Am I saying that right?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Norah McInerney, Yeah, Yeah, she has a ted talk and
uses a phrase in the middle of it, which is
she makes a distinction between moving on and moving forward.
And you just actually used that word when you talked
about what happened with you and your husband, you moved forward.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Oh that's so interesting. I didn't even realize I was
using her phrase, but it's it's such a helpful framework.
So Nora McInerney, she's a writer who lost her first
husband at a very early age and was full of
grief and felt that the culture and everyone she knew
was kind of sending her the message after some period
(42:47):
of time, you know, time to move on, move on,
move on. And she said moving on was impossible, but
what was possible was moving forward, which is to say,
she will mourn her first husband for the rest of
her life at the same time that she went on
to remarry and create a blended family with her new husband.
(43:09):
So she has moved forward with him and with her
husband's memory. You know, the person she is in this
second marriage is not the same person that she would
have been had she never known and loved and lost
her husband. So she has moved forward with him and
with that loss. And I think that's such a liberating
way to think about loss, because it's like allowing us
(43:31):
to acknowledge the enormity of it at the same time
that we're still living our lives. You know. I think
there's a feeling if you're ever going to feel happy again,
that that's a kind of abandonment of the person who's gone.
But the idea of moving forward is telling you that
there is no abandonment at all. You're carrying them with you,
You're moving forward with them.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I love that idea. It makes me think of another
phrase around grief that I love. It was a guest
we had on the show. Her name's Megan Devine, and
she says, so things can't be fixed, they can only
be carried. And I loved that idea too, Like, Okay,
you're not going to fix the fact that you lost
your husband, or God forbid, your child or your dog
that you love deeply. That's not fixable, right, But it
(44:15):
can be carried, you know, there is a way to
carry it. And she says, move forward. You know while
you're carrying it. That phrase is always stuck with me,
and it sort of resonates a little bit with that
one about moving forward versus moving on.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, I love that. I'm going to have to remember
that one. That's a really great image.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
So let's talk about poignancy. That's not a word that
is used a whole lot. Talk to me about poignancy,
what it is and how it ties into everything we've
been talking about.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
The happy tears that we so often feel is poignancy.
It's like a grandparent watches a grandchild splashing in a puddle,
and the grandparent has tears in their eyes as they
watch that child splashing, And why are they crying? Where
do the tears come from? You know, this is like
a beautiful moment, and it's a moment of incredible love
and appreciation for this child. It's also a moment of understanding,
(45:07):
maybe not on a conscious level, that the grandparent may
not be there to see the child grow up, and
that the child herself won't live forever. All of it
is implicit in these moments when we cry those happy tears.
You know, when you tear up at a beautiful TV commercial, like,
that's poignancy. It's poignancy. It's like the perfect blending of
(45:28):
joy and sorrow.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
I am enormously susceptible to it.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think some of
us kind of dance at the tip of that needle
or whatever the expression is at every moment.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Oh yeah, I'm just known for tearing up at nearly everything,
from something that's sad to something like you said that's
sort of poignant, to something about an entire crowd of
people cheering. In the same way, there's something about oh yeah,
it's even beautiful. It just gets me. I won't bore
you or the listeners with it, but there are a
number of running jokes in my family about the absolutely
(45:59):
propos usterous things that have made me cry. But yeah,
poignancy is a great word for it. Also, you know
the thing you said earlier about exactly what you said,
what I feel really is love a great title outpouring
of it. You know, it makes my heart open. There's
an elevation use that word about sad music. It elevates us.
All those things feel wrapped into what I'm feeling when
(46:23):
at and t makes me cry about calling your grandmother, right,
I mean, I know I'm being yanked and manipulated in
a very obvious way, but what's happening inside me is
still beautiful, I think.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, Well, the reason the manipulation works is because it's
pressing you're an our deepest, most potent buttons.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Throughout our whole conversation, I kept thinking of the two
word phrase by E. M. Forster of only connect, Only connect.
That's what he said, And I came across that phrase
when I was a young girl, and it just struck me.
It was like, Oh my gosh, that's the truth of everything.
And every single one of those examples you just gave
(47:02):
was a moment of only connecting.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
I love that phrase. I also love something you say
near the end of the book. You say, there's the
simple exhortation to turn in the direction of beauty. Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, that's something I've really come to believe. And I
also think it's a way for people like us who
exist naturally in this bitter sweet state of being. And
you know, we were talking at the beginning about the
great power of the bitter sweet way of being is
that it can deliver you to these states of wonder
and awe and spirituality and transcendence. And the dark side
(47:34):
of it is that it could deliver you to anxiety
and depression. Well, one of the best ways of marshaling
the powers of a bitter sweet way of being is
to proactively and consciously turn in the direction of beauty
everywhere that you can, because it's all around us. We
think of it as being reserved for the moment you
(47:56):
take the family vacation to the Grand Canyon and you
ooh and awe, or you go to church and you
see the light through the stained glass windows or whatever.
But it doesn't have to be confined to those specific moments.
It can be daily, and it can be constant, and
it can be proactively sought and even chased. I think
we can chase beauty. So like, during the time that
I was writing this book, well during part of it,
(48:19):
there was the pandemic, and there's been all the social
and political strife, and I found myself waking up every
morning and being tormented by my Twitter feed. And I
ended up asking people to recommend to me their favorite
art accounts, and I started following all these artists and
my feed now is just like one giant cascade of art.
(48:41):
And then I started every morning posting a favorite piece
of art onto my social channels and pairing it with
a favorite poem or quote or whatever, and that ended
up attracting this whole community of people who loved to
start their days in that same way, and so it
was like a whole group of people connecting around, turning
in the direction beauty. And I think that's one of
the best ways we have of channeling this bittersweet power.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
I absolutely love that I create an episode each week
for supporters of the show I called teaching Song and
a Poem, and I talk about something that's on my mind,
and I play a song I love and a poem
that I love. And what it does for me is
it orients me all the time looking for that sort
of beauty. So I think that's a beautiful place for
us to end, which is with you encouraging us that
(49:27):
beauty is all around us and to look for it.
You made a bitter Sweet playlist, which people can find
on your website and on Spotify. I could not help
but match you and make my own bittersweet playlist.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Oh my gosh, I've got to listen to it.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
I'll send it to you.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Please do.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
We'll put links in the show notes to Susan's website,
to her playlist to my playlist on your website. Is
the Bittersweet Test, which I scored as you might imagine
very very highly on I'm shocked. Yeah, So where can
people find you? So?
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Best way to find me through my website at Susankane
dot net. You can sign up for my newsletter which
will always keep you up to date, and I'm also
on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and you
can find the Bittersweet book really anywhere you get your books,
and I also have a Bittersweet quiz that I've developed,
which is so cool. We deliver text messages to you
(50:26):
every morning with little sound recordings from me or art
to look at written messages for you. So it's just
like a one minute thing that you get every morning,
a kind of little uplift start to your day, and
you can find that on my website as well.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Awesome, Thank you so much for coming on, Susan. You
and I are going to go into the post show
conversation and we are going to discuss some very specific
songs that were on your Bitter Sweet playlist, and maybe
I'll introduce you to one or two from mine listeners.
If you'd like access to the post show conversations to
that special episode I talked about a couple minutes ago,
you can go to one net slash Join Susan. Thank
(51:02):
you so much. I loved the book, I've loved this conversation,
and I've been wanting to talk with you for a
long time, so I'm really happy we got to do this.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Thank you so much. It was really so lovely to
talk to you. I love the frequency that you're on.
It's very different from many podcasts, and I so appreciate
it and admire it.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Thank you, Thank you so much for listening to the show.
If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking,
I'd love for you to share it with a friend.
Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of
what we do. We don't have a big budget, and
I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(51:41):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode
at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one you Feed community.
Hey friends, Eric here with some exciting news. I've been
writing a book and it's about to be out in
the world in April of twenty twenty six. The working
title is How a Little Becomes a Lot, and it's
all about how small, consistent actions, the kind that we
talk about all the time on this show can lead
to real meaningful change. Right now, the book is in
(00:21):
the editing process and there's still some shaping to do,
which is where you come in. I'd love your input
on what to focus on, how to talk about the book,
even what it should be called. If you've got a
few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make
this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful
to hear them. Just head to oneufeed dot net slash
(00:43):
book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways, and
to behind the scenes look at what it actually takes
to make a book. Editing marathons, title debates, existential spirals,
and me questioning all of my life choices at two
am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's oneufeed dot net
slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part
(01:06):
of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Truly, the same thing that can, when it's not working
right predispose us to anxiety and depression is the very
thing that can bring us to our highest and deepest selves.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(01:49):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our action matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(02:10):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
It's technically sad music, but what I feel really is love.
A great title outpouring of it. I've never had a
good answer for why I find yearning music so strangely
uplifting until this conversation. This week, I talk with Susan Kine,
author of bittersweet and quiet about the strange alchemy where
(02:36):
sorrow becomes beauty and longing becomes connection. We dig into
why certain types of music make our hearts ache in
the best way, and why that ache might actually be
pointing us towards something sacred. Some spiritual traditions can seem
to treat desire and longing like enemies. This conversation offers
a different view that yearning can be a spiritual force
(02:59):
in its own right. Susan also holds a special place
in my heart, not just because of her work, but
because she kindly introduced me to her literary agent who
later became mine. Susan and I talk Leonard Cohen, grief,
transcendence and how turning towards the bitter sweet might just
be the path home. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is
(03:20):
the one you feed. Hi, Susan, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Hey, Eric, it's so great to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
I'm really excited to have you on. You're sort of
a patron saint to introverts everywhere, of which I lean
in that direction. And your latest book, where we're going
to be spending our time, is called Bitter Sweet. How
sorrow and longing make us whole. But before we do that,
let's start, like we always do, with a parable. In
the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild
(03:46):
and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of
us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf,
which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
the others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops, thinks about it
for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
(04:06):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you and your life and the.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Work that you do. So I love that parable, and
it actually seems to me to echo another parable that
I came across while I was researching Bittersweet, which I
have found to be such a great guiding star and
consolation of how to live. And I'll tell you this parable,
(04:32):
and I think you'll see the parallels, but we can
talk about them. So in this other parable, this one
comes from the Kabbalah, which is the mystic form of Judaism.
And in this parable, the idea is that all of
creation originally was an intact divine vessel, but that the
vessel shattered, and that the world that we are living
(04:55):
in now is the broken world following the shattering, but
that scattered all around us still are the divine shards
from when the vessel was still intact, And that one
great way to live a life is to look around
us and to notice the divine shards wherever they have
(05:17):
happened to land around us, and to bend down and
pick them up. And you will notice different shards from
the ones that I will. But we can all do
our own gathering. And I love this and it reminds
me of the parable that you shared, because it's acknowledging
the pain and the tragedy and the evil that exists
(05:37):
in the world without feeling that we have to become
a prisoner to them. So it's not telling us to
look away from them and pretend that they're not there,
which is I think what our mainstream culture would tell us.
It's telling us they're very much there, and we can
admit that and tell the truth about that. And at
the same time we can turn in the other direction,
in the direction of beauty and of love, and that
(05:59):
we have the ability to decide to turn in that direction.
I find that parable to just be such a relief
or a leief to be able to tell the truth.
Also just a great way to live, to know that
we always have that option. So I think it's very
much with the grandparent in your parable was telling the grandchild,
just with a different image.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, It's one of the things I love about the
Wolf parable is exactly what you said, which is it
just sort of says like, hey, we all have this
in us. That's the human condition. It's natural, it's normal.
I've always liked that normalizing of it. And I love
the parable that you told from Judaism, which is a beautiful,
beautiful story. And as you were talking about it, I
actually had another thought, which was, not only are we
(06:39):
walking around collecting the shards, we are ourselves the shards
in some ways, and when we come together, we are
putting them back together in a way. That sort of
flashed into my mind as you were telling that story.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And I think that what their grandparent
was saying also is that we can't deny that these
two aspects of ourselves exist at all times. With denying
it comes a kind of blindness, but we can acknowledge
it and then decide to turn in a particular direction.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Let's jump into the book. I mean, I kind of
have to start close to where you start, which is
by talking about music, and you start the book by
really trying to find out why do some of us
really love what would be considered sad music. And it's funny,
this is an interesting thing in my own household because
I am that type. I listened to melancholy music. Give
(07:32):
me any chance, and I'll listen to it. My partner
really doesn't because it makes her sad. And I haven't
been able to explain to her why I like melancholy
music very well. I haven't been able to put it
into very good words. I was reading your book and
I just stopped and I said, I have to read
you something, which is rare. I normally just interview prep
and she's always like, I wish you'd share more about
(07:52):
what you're interview prepping. And I just am kind of
going on my way, but it was so good it
stopped me and I'm just going to read it really quickly,
if that's okay. Yeah, sure, you said it's hard to
put into words what I experience when I hear this
kind of music. It's technically sad, but what I feel
really is love, a great title outpouring of it, a
deep kinship with all the other souls in the world
(08:13):
who know the sorrow the music strains to express. But
the music makes my heart open, literally the sensation of
expanding chest muscles. And I've been looking for that description
ever since I started listening to melancholy music. So thank you,
You're welcome.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I just got goosebumps knowing that you've been looking for
that explanation as I had been too. I mean, it
was only when I started writing this book that I
actually like put into words exactly what the sensation is
and why it matters so much. The reason I put
music at the heart of the book, I mean, partly
just because it literally was the catalyst for why I
went off on this bittersweet quest in the first place,
(08:49):
but also because the way in which sad music is
a gateway to love, because it unites us in our
state of longing, our state of like exile from Eden.
You could say that's the power of bittersweetness itself, not
just the music, but the bittersweet condition itself, Like the
fact that all humans are united in existing in this
(09:12):
state of what feels to us like a grand imperfection
and impermanence, and you know, longing for the world to
be different from the way that it is. You know,
to see the joys and the beauties in the world
and wish that they could last forever, and wish that
they comprised all of the world instead of only a
part of it. All those longings. The fact that we're
in that together is just this great uniting force. And
(09:37):
the fact that we live in a world that tells
us not to talk about any of that and not
to talk about our sorrows and our longings is like
living in a world that is telling us not to
love each other as deeply as we could.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, and I really want to get to what you
just said a little bit more in detail, which is
about telling us not to love things as deeply as
we do, because not only does our cul tell us
that some of the spiritual traditions I'm most attached to
almost seem to be saying that. But we're going to
save that for a little bit later because we got
to talk about Leonard Cohen for a second. Who you
(10:12):
talk about as your favorite musician and is mine. He
was the guest I most ever all time, wanted to
have on this show, and it didn't happen. I got close.
At one point, I was talking with a guy who
knew him, who was a monk at the center that
Leonard was at, and he said, you should know that
Leonard's monk name means great silence, so just to give
(10:32):
you an idea of how likely you are to get
a conversation with him.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So that's so interesting, And can I interrupt you to
just say that, yeah, he's my guy artistically. After my
book Quiet came out, you know, which is all about
introversion and the power of quiet, he actually tweeted out
of the blue about the book and about Quiet and
how important it is. Oh wow, like a glory day
for me. And I can't believe I can't find the
tweet now, but I will always remember it, so yeah, yeah,
(11:00):
so I just had to share.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
That I remember where I was when I heard that
he passed. I wanted to talk a little bit about
a conversation I think Adam Cohen was saying in an
interview with Rick Rubin, but I loved this line at
the end he's describing what Leonard Cohen's music did, and
Adam his sun said he was giving you a transcendence
delivery system. That's what he was trying to do every time.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I don't have the
quote in front of me, but I think he was
talking about that in the context of talking about how,
you know, his music was famously kind of sorrowful and gloomy,
and his record producers at one point were joking about
how they should give out razor blades along with his
along with his albums, and you know, and that's what
he was famous for. But what Adam was saying is yes,
(11:46):
and I mean it wasn't only about brokenness. It was
about brokenness pointing in the direction of transcendence. The song
that is best known of his and has been covered
maybe more than any other song music history, is Hallelujah.
And Hallelujah is about I mean, it's literally in his words,
it is about the broken Hallelujah, a cold and broken Hallelujah.
(12:09):
So I think in all his music he's constantly expressing
and wrestling with the bittersweet, the way in which everything
is so fundamentally broken and so fundamentally beautiful.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, I agree. So there's one other thing I
would just want to talk about with music for a second,
something else that you said that I really love. You
said this type of music. You're talking about a specific song,
but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Don't simply discharge your emotions, they elevate them. And also
you say it's only sad music that elicits exalted states
of communion, and awe, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
This is an interesting thing. I did a little bit
of research and studying of the whole nature of sad
music and why we love it so. And you and
I are not the only ones who feel this way. Many,
many people do. The people whose favorite songs are happy
listen to them one hundred and seventy five times on
their playlist. But the people whose favorite songs are sad
listen eight hundred times. And they tell, yeah, you know,
(13:06):
they feel this deep sense of connection, And they tell
researchers that the music makes them feel connected to the
sublime and the wondrous. And it's not just because of
quote negativity per se, because this does not happen for
music that expresses anger or disgust or you know, any
other negative emotions you can think of. It's specifically something
(13:29):
about sadness. And in fact, there was this one study
done by an MIT economist. It was published in an
MIT review under the title how are you, my dearest Mozart?
And in this study, the economist he took all the
letters that Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt had written throughout their lives,
(13:51):
and he coded each of the letters based on the
emotions expressed within them, and then he correlated the time
at which those letters had been written and look at
what music the composer had produced at that time. And
he found that the most and the only predictive emotion
of all was sadness. That when the letters expressed sorrow,
(14:12):
that was what reliably predicted the most profound and the
greatest of their works. And again, not any other negative emotion,
just sadness, just sorrow. So there's something about this state
of sorrow. And I think anybody who feels a kind
of creative spirit in them we all know this, We've
been there. There's something about a state of sorrow that
(14:32):
puts us in mind of a kind of like longing
and reaching upwards, wanting to transform the sorrow into something else.
Into something high, into something sublime.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I think that's really fascinating that sorrow is the emotion that,
as you say, it can sort of lead us to
these higher states of transcendence, of awe, of beauty. It's
not the other negative emotions. And it made me think
a little bit about the idea of neuro right, neurosis
being very often something we're layering on top of to
(15:05):
avoid feeling maybe the core emotion, which might be sorrow.
And so these sort of more neurotic emotions, that's, for
lack of a better word, I'm going to use them
anxiety or depression. I'm a depression sufferer. We'll talk about that,
that these things actually are ways of avoiding what is
actually most healing in some ways.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And it's interesting that
you use the word neurosis because one of the things
I did when I started researching this book, I basically
was researching for years what I call the bittersweet tradition,
which is all the religions, wisdom traditions, artists, philosophers, poets
who have been talking about this bittersweet state of being
(15:45):
for thousands of years all across the world, and I
looked also at mainstream psychology. In mainstream psychology, there really
is no word for this state, the state of like
this beautifully piercing longing that I was trying to investigate.
The only word that comes close is the word of neurosis,
as you said, except when psychology talks about neurosis, it's
(16:07):
only talking about the problem of it. It is a
real problem when it goes too far and it descends
into anxiety and depression, and for anyone who's been there
that those are not pleasant states. But there's nothing in
psychology or in this terminology that talks about the great
(16:27):
transcendent longing that's at the heart of human nature, and
that is intimately connected. The same thing that can when
it's not working right predispose us to anxiety and depression
is the very thing that can bring us to our
highest and deepest selves. And so a lot of the
(16:47):
chalent of life is figuring out what to do with
that thing and how to use its powers, its powers
which can be dangerous but which can also be beautiful
and transformative.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
You wrote this idea of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence
and love is at the heart of this book. And
when I read that. I was like, that's as good
a description of what we've been trying to do over
five hundred episodes, right, which is, you know, I'm a
recovering addict, I have depression. You know. My whole thing is,
how do we take this difficult stuff that we all
face every human life? You know, Buddhist says we're all
(17:20):
brothers and sisters in sickness, old age, and death right,
So for all of us, how do we take that, yeah,
and create something meaningful and beautiful exactly?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
You know, in the book, I have this quiz that
we developed. It's called the Bittersweet Quiz. I say wee
because I did it together with the psychologists David Aiden
and Scott Barry Kaufman. David Aiden's at Hopkins, and the
quiz basically asks a bunch of different questions, questions like
do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day?
Do you react very intensely to music our nature? And
(17:51):
there's a bunch of questions. You can find it either
in the book or on my website. And what we
found is that people who score high on the quiz,
meaning that they tend to this bitter sweet state of mind,
These same people. They have maybe exactly what you would
predict in terms of strength and vulnerabilities. Their strengths are
(18:12):
that they also score high end measures of receptivity to
wonder and awe and spirituality. And that was a strong correlation.
But then there is also a more minor but still
significant correlation with anxiety and depression. It's like the quiz codified.
I think what you just said and what we've both
been reaching towards, which is, there is something in this
(18:34):
bitter sweet state, this state in which you're aware of
life's joys and sorrows, and you're aware of its impermanence,
and you're deeply connected to that and connected to its beauty.
There's something about that state that, if you're following it
and you're in your best self moment, let's say, it
can deliver you to states of great wonder, and if
(18:56):
you're not careful to manage it right, it can also
deliver you to a place the depression. The question is
how do you do it right?
Speaker 1 (19:28):
I've asked that question I feel like hundreds of different ways,
which is, why do some people take pain and turn
it into something beautiful? And I don't only mean art right,
It could be it could just be loved. It becomes
a creative force in their life. And I would say,
a good thing in the world. Why does that happen
in some cases? And in other cases we see people
(19:50):
just broken by the difficulties in life, you know, And
so what are the factors in there? And you in
the book later on say there's different pathways to the
piece we all seek. You're trying to sort of answer
this question, at least it seems to me. And I'm
just going to read the four that you came up
with and let you kind of talk about them. First
(20:10):
one was sort of, you know, let it go, some
degree of you know, just letting things go. The other
is to know how resilient we are, to really lean
into resilience. The other is non attachment, right, and trying
to aspire to a love that is bigger than possession.
And then the last one, you say, this is the
(20:30):
one you're going to need to explain, is the way
of even so carries a different wisdom, one that expresses
the longing that many of his sense is the force
that will carry us home.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah. So that last one comes from a poem that
was written by Issa. One of the great Japanese Buddhist poets,
and it was written after he lost his beloved young
daughter to smallpox, and he says in the poem, basically
he says, I know that this world do do like
(21:01):
dw I know that this world of do is just
a world of do. But even so, but even so,
and he's basically saying, you know, I get it that
everything is impermanent. I get it that we're just dewdrops
who we're all of us going to evaporate any minute. Now.
I understand that. And yet there's something in me that
doesn't accept that. There's something in me that will insist
(21:24):
on feeling sorrow and feeling grief for my lost daughter
no matter what. And I think there's so much beauty
and wisdom in that poem. He's a trained Buddhist. He's saying,
even I feel this way, and implicit in the poem
because there's a reader at the other end of that poem,
and he knows it. He's not writing it to himself,
(21:44):
so implicit is there's a reader on the other end
who feels the exact same way, who, no matter what,
will feel a grief and feel a longing, and that
we are united in that feeling, and there's something about
the uniting of that, the fact that all humans are
in that state together, that is a great joy of
its own. There's one young woman who I quote in
(22:06):
the book who calls this the union between souls, and
she's talking about how she experiences that at her grandfather's funeral.
At the funeral, there's a barbershop chorus who sings a
song in tribute of her grandfather, and she sees her
father for the first time in her life, crying in
front of her, crying in public. And she says, what
(22:27):
she remembers of that funeral is not the sorrow, but
the union between souls that happen there. And I think
that's what is bringing to life when he says, I
may be a Buddhist, and I may understand it about
the two drops, but come on, we're all in this together.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I love that idea. You say, this is the ultimate paradox.
We transcend grief only when we realize that we're connected
with all the other humans who can't transcend grief, because
we will always say but even so, even so, what
I love about that poem, and I've tried to articulate
this and listen, have heard this before. I try to
articulate and talk about an experience I had when I
(23:05):
had to put to sleep a dog that I love
deeply beyond all measure, and I had had to put
down another dog like eight months before, And for whatever reason,
I was able to sort of like say, you know what, Yep,
this is a world of do. It's a world of do.
We come, we go as creatures, we get sick, we die.
(23:25):
This is what happens. So I sort of set down
my argument with the universe, and I just was able
to descend into the grief itself, and it felt beautiful.
It was so clear to me that that grief was
the parallel, the other side of the great love. You know,
I was having great grief because I'd had great love.
But in order to do that, I feel like I
(23:48):
had to set down my defense against it. I had
to sit down the but it shouldn't have happened. He's
too young. But I just had to put down another
dog eight months ago. All my arguments with the universe,
you said. But even so, even knowing all that, really sad,
and yet there was a deep beauty in it that
I had not experienced in other grieving situations where I
(24:10):
had sort of grieved and argued my way through them.
I don't know if that resonates with you.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, absolutely, thank you for sharing that story. Yeah, it does,
it does. I think there's something about setting aside our
griefs too soon. Maybe that feels not human and deprives
us of the process the way it is even for
somebody who does get through grief with a great measure
(24:36):
of resilience. And you know, as I write in the book,
the Columbia psychologist George Bonano, who studies grief, has found
that the vast majority of us I don't surprise ourselves
by how resilient we end up being in the face
of grief. It's not true for everybody. Some people really
get into chronic grief, but many, many people are more
(24:56):
resilient than they expect to be. But that doesn't mean
they don't pass through the moments of feeling it so
incredibly intensely. And it doesn't mean they might not feel it.
You know, fifty years from now, fifty years from the
day they've lost their beloved, it can come up upon
them unawares. So all of that is part of the
same MESSI soup I agree.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I think there's this idea that is in certain circles,
and your book is part of this, which beautifully says, hey,
difficult experiences can become really beautiful things, and we hear
that and we buy into that, and yet they're still
brutal when you're in them. They're still like, that's a
(25:36):
lovely idea. I find it helpful to hold a kernel
of it in my mind some of the time when
I'm in the darkness, like, Okay, yeah, this is transforming,
but you still got to go through it, and it
is not pleasant at certain moments, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Absolutely. And I also want to take a minute to
acknowledge that I think there are for some people, some
griefs and some traumas that are so enormal and so
horrible and so beyond what any human should be exposed
to that maybe you don't ever get to that place,
or maybe you only get to glimpses of that place.
And I'm thinking, in particular, there's someone I've come to
(26:12):
know over the years who as a child was just
exposed to such a heart wrenching and horrible degree of
abuse that you just can't even imagine. Well, I guess
you can say two things about him now as a
grown adult. One is that his life is forever marred
in a very deep way. I'm in touch with him
every day. I don't think I've seen him go through
(26:33):
a single day without suffering emotionally as a result of
what happened to him as a child. It's also the
case that he has an incredibly loving soul who writes
poetry every day and does great acts of love for
the people around him almost every day. And so both
of these things are true at once. But I'm invoking
(26:55):
him to say, I don't think it's easy, and I
do wonder if there are some degree of grief and
trauma beyond which maybe a full healing isn't possible. To me,
the jury's out on that question.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I agree, I agree one hundred percent. I believe some
degree of healing is always possible, but how much is
up in the eye. I wonder about this a lot,
you know, being a recovering addict and alcoholic, this is
a question I think about a lot, which is, we
know that trauma is a huge indicator for addiction, and
we know the more traumatic experiences you've had, the higher
(27:29):
that relationship really is. And so we see some people
who get sober and you're like, well, my god, what
they went through was just I can't fathom, you know,
And yet they get sober, And then you see other
people that don't, even with much less trauma. So I
think this sort of healing process, to me, it's deeply mysterious.
One of my great mysteries of my adult life has
(27:51):
always been why do some of us get sober and
others don't? And for every answer I give, I can
find people that contradict whatever answer I come up with,
and I'm left with a mystery. Yeah, I don't think
we can fully articulate something as complex as healing, and
the world is deeply complex. And I think that's what
The Bitter Sweet to Me also takes into account. There's
(28:11):
some measure in it to me of this is all
deeply mysterious, and that that mystery can be deeply both
terrifying but also deeply beautiful.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, that's right. You know how in the book I
give different examples of people who have been engaging with
the Bittersweet tradition all over the world, and one of
them is the poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, and he calls
the longing aspect of the bitter sweet, like that mysterious
longing that so many of us feel. He calls it
the great force that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain. Hmmm,
(28:45):
and I think that really embodies the mystery that you're
talking about.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, in the bitter Sweet tradition, you actually say what
I call the bitter sweet is a tendency to states
of longing, poignancy and sorrow, and acute awareness of passing time,
and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.
So I thought, for a minute, we could talk about
those states individually. We've talked a little bit about sorrow,
so I don't know if we need to go back
(29:09):
to sorrow. Maybe we'll land there. It seems to be
where I often even without meaning too. No, I'm joking
sort of. But let's talk about longing, because this is
a really interesting one, because I've seen longing as a
deeply beautiful thing, and yet, as somebody who studied a
(29:29):
lot in Buddhism, we're also told to watch out for craving.
And you stumble right into this in the book and
talk about it. So I really wanted to talk about
that for a little while, because I think that is
such a big and confusing sort of distinction.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, I agree with you, of course. And there is
a state of longing, a state of yearning that exists
across all the traditions. Right there's the longing for the
garden of Eden, and the longing for Mecca, the longing
to be united with God, the longing for somewhere over
the rainbow, you know. In Homer's Odyssey, like that's a
(30:09):
story of epic adventure, that's the way we think of it,
but really that's a story of Ulysses longing for home.
The adventure happened because he was filled with homesickness for
his native Ithaca that he hadn't seen, I think for
seventeen years or something like that. And he's weeping on
a beach with homesickness, and that's what sets him off
(30:29):
on the journey that ultimately brings him home. But this
idea of you know, I'm a poor wayfaring stranger longing
for that world of home, there is something about that,
this longing for home, this ultimate home, whether we think
of it explicitly in terms of the divine or more
metaphorically in terms of like longing for perfect union, perfect love,
(30:52):
that is central to what human beings are, that is
central to who we are. We are creatures who long
for an ultimate union and long for an ultimate home,
and we come into this world crying, as psychoanalyst would say, well,
it's because we left the womb. But going more deeply
(31:12):
the womb is the representation of that ultimate home for
which we long. And so many of the great theologians
and mystics have taught across all the traditions that we
should go deeper into the longing because it's the longing
itself that brings us closer to that for which we long.
Remi says that he's talking about God or Allah. He's saying,
(31:33):
the longing you express is the return message from the
divine that you seek. The grief you cry out from
is what draws you towards union. Your pure sadness that
wants help, that is the secret cup. So all these traditions,
and particularly the Sufi tradition, which is the mystic side
of Islam, all these traditions speak of this divine nature
(31:54):
of longing. And as soon as I started learning about
all this and diving into these traditions, I felt like
a kind of homecoming because I felt like, oh my gosh,
you know, this is what I have been experiencing all
my life and never really understood what it was. But then,
like you, I had this big question of like, I mean,
I'm not an expert in Buddhism, but I know something
about it and the way that Buddhism warns us against craving.
(32:18):
And I thought, well, how do these teachings about the
you could call it divine nature of longing. How do
these teachings square with Buddhism's warning against giving into craving.
So I went to ask a Sufi teacher about this. Actually,
this is llewell and von Lee, the great Sufi teacher
who's based in California, And I asked him this very
question at a retreat that he gave the difference between
longing and Sufhism and Buddhism, and he says, longing is
(32:42):
different from craving. Longing is the craving of the soul
you want to go home. He says, in our culture
it's confused with depression, and it's not depression. There's a
saying in Sufhism. Sufhism was at first heartache. Only later
it became something to write about. And then he said
to me, if you're taken by longing, live it. You
(33:04):
can't go wrong. If you're going to go to God,
go with sweet sorrow in the soul. And I say
all this as an agnostic myself, and yet like, there's
such a deep truth in this message, and one that
I think coexists with the exhortation against craving, because this
longing that we're talking about is more about a longing
for everything that is good and true and beautiful and love.
(33:29):
And where's the harm in that?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I think that we find this paradox right in the
center of Buddhism. I know I've talked about it with
many Buddhist teachers, which is this idea of why are
we even practicing if we don't want something, Like, what
are we doing if there's not some desire, Like we're
not sitting around meditating for no reason. We're doing it
because there's something that we are after we want. And
(34:27):
even the Buddha talks about you know, great determination. Determination
comes when you're like, well, there's something I want and
I'm determined to get it. So I think that even
within Buddhism, we sort of just have to sit with
this paradox that says, yeah, there are some things that
we want, and that longing is okay. I love the
way Houston Smith in his book The Great World Religions,
(34:48):
it's a classic, but he talks about Hinduism and he
paraphrases this, So I want to make sure I'm saying
that it's what he said, not what Hinduism said. But
he said about Hinduism that basically what Hinduism is saying
is your desire is great, you just are desiring the
wrong things. It's not strong enough, it's not big enough,
and that that's the normal path through life. That when
(35:11):
we're younger, we desire the things of the world, and
that's natural and normal, and as we grow old, we
start to go, wait, there's something more. The things of
the world aren't satisfying, So what is this bigger thing?
So I just love this question because it's another one
of the things that I feel like has been central
to what I've asked people on this show for five
hundred episodes, which is this longing seems clear, it seems real,
(35:36):
it seems true, it seems innate to human nature, and
it feels right. And we also know that craving over
attachment causes a great deal of suffering, and so trying
to balance that paradox, I think is really important work.
It's kind of similar to like trying to balance that
thin line of Okay, I'm going to turn difficulty and
sorrow into beauty or I'm going to fall off the
(35:58):
other side.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. That's
a great way of putting it. Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, do you think that the idea of saying
that what we're all ultimately longing for is love, by
which I don't mean like a new relationship kind of love.
I mean, like like love if that's something that unites
all the different religious traditions, including Buddhism. Yeah, I mean
(36:20):
Buddhism would say I love without attachment.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah. Yeah, I've always loved the Joseph Campbell quote around
you know that we're not looking for the meaning of life,
We're looking for the feeling of being alive. Yeah, you know, yeah,
we could call that love, we could call that transcendence,
we could call it connection. You know, when I think
about spirituality, and I've got a course called spiritual habits. Right.
So it's a word I use when I think about
(36:44):
what it means most deeply. It just to me is
about connection to what matters. That's going to be different
for everybody, but it's about connection to what matters, and
so you know, the words we use might be different,
but I do think that that's what we're after. And
as we're talking, I'm thinking about early days of Alcoholics
Anonymous and Bill Wilson was the founder and he got
into a correspondence via letters with Carl Jung and Young
(37:09):
made the connection that said, you know, what alcoholics are
after is an experience of the transcendent. It's in the
word spirit spirit us. You know we call alcohol spirits.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
That's what's being chased, absent, and the only thing that's
going to be a cure for that is something that
addresses that need, which is why AA became a spiritual program,
very religious in its early leanings, and it's diversified, but
it's pointing to that same thing, that there's some connection
we need to something that's more than us and our
(37:42):
little wants.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Absolutely, Oh my gosh, that's so true. You know, it's
funny as you say that. So I wrote most of
my first book Quiet in this amazing, beautiful little cafe
in Greenwich Village no longer exists, but it was called Doma,
and don't I had this magical spirit about it, and
it drew artists and writers and actors from all over
(38:05):
the city. They would come and hang out there and
work on their stuff and have conversations. It was such
a magical place. I hung out there all the time
for a number of years, and once or twice a
week I would notice there was this group of people
who would come in the evening to Doma and they
would sit together and talk. And I always noticed them
because they seemed so alive and so full of spirit,
(38:29):
and I wondered where they came from. And then at
a certain point someone told me, Oh, there's an AA
group that meets down the block, and this group is
coming from there. And it was such a striking group
of people, like you just noticed, as I say, you
notice them immediately, and they had a kind of magical
property about them, like even more than the usual denizens
of Doma.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it can have that effect. And I
think the other thing you talk about in the book
is that sometimes the things that lead us most commonly
to transcend and exalted experiences is difficulty, sadness, a understanding
that life is finite, you know. And I think a
lot of people, particularly early on in AA. I mean,
(39:07):
I was so close to death when I came in,
you know, as a heroin Addict, that I was just
so aware of it that it made life sort of
glow in a different way. Sometimes I wish I could
recapture that, you know, a little bit more with the
emotional maturity I have now and the spiritual energy I
had then would be perfect. Oh.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Interesting, interesting, Yeah, And I mean there are all those
studies that I talk about in the books, like David
Yaiden Johns Hopkins, that guy who I developed the Bittersweet
Quiz with. He's done studies where he has tried to
track what are the conditions that cause people to experience
the great, spiritual and transcendent moments of their lives, and
(39:46):
he's found that one of the most reliable ones is
being at moments of transition, including moments of great loss,
including approaching death. And other studies that have found that
if you ask people to imagine, what are the emotion
that they would feel upon approaching deaths, like people assume
the emotions would be, you know, like feel depressed and
(40:06):
angry and like that, But when you talk to people
who are actually dying, it's nothing like that. They're reporting
much more uplifted and much more spiritual emotions a lot
of the time. So there is something about being open
to these states of transition. Those are some of our
great gateway moments, even the transitions that feel really difficult
and that feel as if they're full of loss.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
It certainly has been the case for me. Transitions of
all different sorts have been big moments, and most of
them have been ones that I wouldn't have chosen.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yes, exactly exactly. You never choose it. You never choose it.
This is a very innocuous one, or a very mild one.
But I went through an experience like this a little bit.
Just this past summer, my two sons went to Sleepway
camp for the first time. Like my husband and I
really have devoted everything, you know, to our kids over
(40:58):
these years, and suddenly they weren't home, and we knew
they weren't going to be home again for the rest
of the summer, and that, you know, and of itself
was a kind of like foretelling of them going away
to college and growing up and all the rest of it.
And the first day or so, I just felt such
a blue feeling, you know, like a blue sense of loss.
And then life went forward and I don't know, my
(41:20):
husband and I we went to the beach, just the
two of us for the first time in so long,
and it was such an incredible experience, and it was
like a kind of second honeymoon, like we had only
just met and at the same time that we had
known each other all our lives. It was just this
great thing that would not have happened but for passing
through that blue moment of transition.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I mean that's a real one that children going away,
as you mentioned in a small way summer camp and
then the big way in college, like that is a
big thing for people. That emptiness, to me is a
really real thing and it can be very difficult, but
it's also very fertile, as you sort of found. Just
used a word in there that brings me to something
(42:02):
else I wanted to talk about with you, because you
talk about the author Nora mcernie. Am I saying that right?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Norah McInerney, Yeah, Yeah, she has a ted talk and
uses a phrase in the middle of it, which is
she makes a distinction between moving on and moving forward.
And you just actually used that word when you talked
about what happened with you and your husband, you moved forward.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Oh that's so interesting. I didn't even realize I was
using her phrase, but it's it's such a helpful framework.
So Nora McInerney, she's a writer who lost her first
husband at a very early age and was full of
grief and felt that the culture and everyone she knew
was kind of sending her the message after some period
(42:47):
of time, you know, time to move on, move on,
move on. And she said moving on was impossible, but
what was possible was moving forward, which is to say,
she will mourn her first husband for the rest of
her life at the same time that she went on
to remarry and create a blended family with her new husband.
(43:09):
So she has moved forward with him and with her
husband's memory. You know, the person she is in this
second marriage is not the same person that she would
have been had she never known and loved and lost
her husband. So she has moved forward with him and
with that loss. And I think that's such a liberating
way to think about loss, because it's like allowing us
(43:31):
to acknowledge the enormity of it at the same time
that we're still living our lives. You know. I think
there's a feeling if you're ever going to feel happy again,
that that's a kind of abandonment of the person who's gone.
But the idea of moving forward is telling you that
there is no abandonment at all. You're carrying them with you,
You're moving forward with them.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I love that idea. It makes me think of another
phrase around grief that I love. It was a guest
we had on the show. Her name's Megan Devine, and
she says, so things can't be fixed, they can only
be carried. And I loved that idea too, Like, Okay,
you're not going to fix the fact that you lost
your husband, or God forbid, your child or your dog
that you love deeply. That's not fixable, right, But it
(44:15):
can be carried, you know, there is a way to
carry it. And she says, move forward. You know while
you're carrying it. That phrase is always stuck with me,
and it sort of resonates a little bit with that
one about moving forward versus moving on.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, I love that. I'm going to have to remember
that one. That's a really great image.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
So let's talk about poignancy. That's not a word that
is used a whole lot. Talk to me about poignancy,
what it is and how it ties into everything we've
been talking about.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
The happy tears that we so often feel is poignancy.
It's like a grandparent watches a grandchild splashing in a puddle,
and the grandparent has tears in their eyes as they
watch that child splashing, And why are they crying? Where
do the tears come from? You know, this is like
a beautiful moment, and it's a moment of incredible love
and appreciation for this child. It's also a moment of understanding,
(45:07):
maybe not on a conscious level, that the grandparent may
not be there to see the child grow up, and
that the child herself won't live forever. All of it
is implicit in these moments when we cry those happy tears.
You know, when you tear up at a beautiful TV commercial, like,
that's poignancy. It's poignancy. It's like the perfect blending of
(45:28):
joy and sorrow.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
I am enormously susceptible to it.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think some of
us kind of dance at the tip of that needle
or whatever the expression is at every moment.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Oh yeah, I'm just known for tearing up at nearly everything,
from something that's sad to something like you said that's
sort of poignant, to something about an entire crowd of
people cheering. In the same way, there's something about oh yeah,
it's even beautiful. It just gets me. I won't bore
you or the listeners with it, but there are a
number of running jokes in my family about the absolutely
(45:59):
propos usterous things that have made me cry. But yeah,
poignancy is a great word for it. Also, you know
the thing you said earlier about exactly what you said,
what I feel really is love a great title outpouring
of it. You know, it makes my heart open. There's
an elevation use that word about sad music. It elevates us.
All those things feel wrapped into what I'm feeling when
(46:23):
at and t makes me cry about calling your grandmother, right,
I mean, I know I'm being yanked and manipulated in
a very obvious way, but what's happening inside me is
still beautiful, I think.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, Well, the reason the manipulation works is because it's
pressing you're an our deepest, most potent buttons.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Throughout our whole conversation, I kept thinking of the two
word phrase by E. M. Forster of only connect, Only connect.
That's what he said, And I came across that phrase
when I was a young girl, and it just struck me.
It was like, Oh my gosh, that's the truth of everything.
And every single one of those examples you just gave
(47:02):
was a moment of only connecting.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
I love that phrase. I also love something you say
near the end of the book. You say, there's the
simple exhortation to turn in the direction of beauty. Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, that's something I've really come to believe. And I
also think it's a way for people like us who
exist naturally in this bitter sweet state of being. And
you know, we were talking at the beginning about the
great power of the bitter sweet way of being is
that it can deliver you to these states of wonder
and awe and spirituality and transcendence. And the dark side
(47:34):
of it is that it could deliver you to anxiety
and depression. Well, one of the best ways of marshaling
the powers of a bitter sweet way of being is
to proactively and consciously turn in the direction of beauty
everywhere that you can, because it's all around us. We
think of it as being reserved for the moment you
(47:56):
take the family vacation to the Grand Canyon and you
ooh and awe, or you go to church and you
see the light through the stained glass windows or whatever.
But it doesn't have to be confined to those specific moments.
It can be daily, and it can be constant, and
it can be proactively sought and even chased. I think
we can chase beauty. So like, during the time that
I was writing this book, well during part of it,
(48:19):
there was the pandemic, and there's been all the social
and political strife, and I found myself waking up every
morning and being tormented by my Twitter feed. And I
ended up asking people to recommend to me their favorite
art accounts, and I started following all these artists and
my feed now is just like one giant cascade of art.
(48:41):
And then I started every morning posting a favorite piece
of art onto my social channels and pairing it with
a favorite poem or quote or whatever, and that ended
up attracting this whole community of people who loved to
start their days in that same way, and so it
was like a whole group of people connecting around, turning
in the direction beauty. And I think that's one of
the best ways we have of channeling this bittersweet power.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
I absolutely love that I create an episode each week
for supporters of the show I called teaching Song and
a Poem, and I talk about something that's on my mind,
and I play a song I love and a poem
that I love. And what it does for me is
it orients me all the time looking for that sort
of beauty. So I think that's a beautiful place for
us to end, which is with you encouraging us that
(49:27):
beauty is all around us and to look for it.
You made a bitter Sweet playlist, which people can find
on your website and on Spotify. I could not help
but match you and make my own bittersweet playlist.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Oh my gosh, I've got to listen to it.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
I'll send it to you.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Please do.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
We'll put links in the show notes to Susan's website,
to her playlist to my playlist on your website. Is
the Bittersweet Test, which I scored as you might imagine
very very highly on I'm shocked. Yeah, So where can
people find you? So?
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Best way to find me through my website at Susankane
dot net. You can sign up for my newsletter which
will always keep you up to date, and I'm also
on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and you
can find the Bittersweet book really anywhere you get your books,
and I also have a Bittersweet quiz that I've developed,
which is so cool. We deliver text messages to you
(50:26):
every morning with little sound recordings from me or art
to look at written messages for you. So it's just
like a one minute thing that you get every morning,
a kind of little uplift start to your day, and
you can find that on my website as well.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Awesome, Thank you so much for coming on, Susan. You
and I are going to go into the post show
conversation and we are going to discuss some very specific
songs that were on your Bitter Sweet playlist, and maybe
I'll introduce you to one or two from mine listeners.
If you'd like access to the post show conversations to
that special episode I talked about a couple minutes ago,
you can go to one net slash Join Susan. Thank
(51:02):
you so much. I loved the book, I've loved this conversation,
and I've been wanting to talk with you for a
long time, so I'm really happy we got to do this.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Thank you so much. It was really so lovely to
talk to you. I love the frequency that you're on.
It's very different from many podcasts, and I so appreciate
it and admire it.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Thank you, Thank you so much for listening to the show.
If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking,
I'd love for you to share it with a friend.
Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of
what we do. We don't have a big budget, and
I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(51:41):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode
at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one you Feed community.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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