In Defense of Melancholy

Have you ever ever questioned why we love unhappy songs, or get choked up at a “Thanks, Mother” Olympics business? Questions like these had been the impetus for Susan Cain’s new e book, “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Entire.”

“Bittersweetness is the hidden supply of our moonshots, masterpieces and love tales,” writes Ms. Cain, who believes that we expertise our deepest states of affection, happiness, awe and creativity exactly as a result of life is imperfect, not despite that reality. On the coronary heart of her exploration is the naming and reframing of her titular paradox: that there is no such thing as a bitter with out candy.

“Bittersweet,” which is an element memoir and partly a take a look at neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, faith, epigenetics, music, poetry and artwork, makes a case for the underappreciated “curiously piercing pleasure at the great thing about the world” inside a tradition of relentless optimism. The e book goals to clarify that irrepressible lump in our throat spurred by seeing a picture of our highschool grad as a grinning toddler.

“The unhappiness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of connection and love,” she writes. And this “happiness of melancholy” has a physiological signature and rationalization.

It seems, Ms. Cain writes, that the vagus nerve — the constellation of nerves that connects the mind stem to the throat and the stomach and is answerable for digestion, respiratory and coronary heart price — can be related to compassion within the face of unhappiness, our intuition to guard our younger and want to expertise pleasure.

Fittingly, the oldest, most instinctive a part of our nervous system, which advanced in order that we had the required empathy to reply to our underdeveloped newborns, Ms. Cain signifies, can be the positioning of the very sadness-joy-survival continuum that makes us human.

Ms. Cain, who can be the creator of “Quiet: The Energy of Introverts in a World That Can’t Cease Speaking,” mentioned the significance of sorrow and extra within the edited interview under.

What would you want folks to know about being open to or celebrating emotions like unhappiness and longing?

S. C.: We might do higher to know that probably the most basic facet of being human is the longing to dwell in a extra excellent and exquisite world than the one which we dwell in now. Generally that’s expressed in explicitly spiritual phrases, just like the eager for Mecca or for Zion, or for Eden, or like the best way the Sufis put it, which is my favourite, “the eager for the beloved of the soul.”

But it surely’s additionally in these moments after we see a stunning waterfall or a portray that’s so lovely that it makes us cry. That’s a non secular impulse that we’re having. What we’re actually seeing is an expression of that extra excellent and exquisite world that we really feel like we come from and that we have to return to.

Inform us a little bit concerning the significance of “longing,” the way it’s been misunderstood in fashionable occasions and inside the context of a tradition pushed by “the tyranny of optimism?”

S.C.: In our tradition, you say the phrase “longing” and also you may assume “mired in longing” or “wallowing in longing,” however that’s not the way it has been understood traditionally. Within the “Odyssey,” Odysseus was seized by homesickness and that was what propelled him on his journey.

That’s what carries you to the divine, to creativity. I don’t consider we must be making a distinction between the divine and creativity and compassion and all this stuff. They’re all manifestations of the identical basic state of humanity.

For those who had revealed this e book earlier than the pandemic, do you assume there can be a unique stage of reception?

S.C.: Once I gave my TED Speak on bittersweetness in the summertime of 2019, it was fascinating how a lot the very act of speaking about sorrow, longing and bittersweetness was seen as being a press release of despair, versus a cleareyed view of what life is.

The truth that all people must undergo that collectively is one in every of our deepest sources of communion and one in every of our deepest sources of artwork and wonder. I believe it was very exhausting for half the viewers to understand that at that second in time. I believe if I had been giving that discuss at present, it is likely to be completely different.

You make an enormous distinction between candy melancholy and despair. How do you outline the distinction?

S.C.: I’m melancholic by nature, however I consider myself as a contented melancholic. I’m truly not depressive within the scientific sense of that time period.

It’s actually attention-grabbing as a result of there’s an extended custom that goes again centuries of speaking about melancholy and its mysterious virtues — greater than 2,000 years in the past Aristotle was asking why it’s that lots of the nice poets and philosophers and politicians have a melancholic character. Melancholy and despair are two distinct states, however typically no distinction is made.

What fields of psychology are bucking this tendency towards pathologizing melancholy?

S.C.: One psychologist, Dacher Keltner, who I wrote about within the e book, has finished pioneering work on what he calls the “compassionate intuition,” and he factors out that the very phrase “compassion” means struggling collectively. So what you’re doing while you’re feeling compassionate is definitely experiencing this sorrow of others.

Once we consider human nature, we regularly both cynically or despairingly go to the thought of survival of the fittest, however Dr. Keltner says we must also actually be speaking about survival of the kindest, as a result of as people, the one means that we survive is by with the ability to reply to the cries of our infants. What has radiated outward from there’s that we’re not solely responding to our personal infants’ cries, we react to the cries of different folks’s infants after which we react to different human beings in misery generally.

Can listening to bittersweet, minor-key music, prime you for “the bittersweet mind-set” and life’s fragility?

S.C.: Sure, completely. In reality, that was truly the catalyst that received me to start out penning this e book. I might take heed to a technically unhappy tune, however what it made me really feel as a substitute was a way of communion with different individuals who had additionally recognized the sorrow that the music was expressing. And with this unbelievable sense of awe and gratitude towards the musician for with the ability to translate what had clearly originated in ache and to remodel it into magnificence. It’s sort of like my church once I take heed to that music. My playlist is on Spotify, truly.

What are your “bittersweet” practices?

S.C.: Meditation is one thing that I follow on and off, together with mindfulness. However I’m additionally actually fascinated by exploring any experiences that make me really feel extra related to a state of affection. There’s one other follow that I’ve began doing over the past yr or in order that got here out of the pandemic.

In the course of the starting of the pandemic, I fell into this behavior of doomscrolling Twitter. It was what I might do very first thing within the morning as I awakened. I made a decision that was actually unhealthy. I used to be considering of the poem by Rumi the place he talks about how we get up each morning, empty and frightened, and as a substitute of going straight to our research, we must always pull down the musical instrument and let the wonder be what you do.

So I made a decision to start out my mornings as a substitute with magnificence. I requested on Twitter for folks to suggest their favourite artwork accounts and I began following them. And now my feed is stuffed with artwork. Earlier than I do the rest, I take the time to pair the artwork with a favourite poem or an concept that I’m fascinated with or no matter. It’s a each day follow that I like.