Poured Over: Susan Cain on Bittersweet

By Miwa Messer / April 19, 2022 at 6:00 am

“Leonard Cohen is like my all-time favorite musician….I, all my life, have had this reaction to sad music of not feeling sad at all when I listened to it. Instead, what I feel is a kind of sense of uplift, and a sense of wonder and awe that a musician could take pain and turn it into beauty. And most of all, a kind of sense of connection with the musician and with all the other people who are listening to it. It’s a kind of like beautiful acknowledgement that the state of being human involves loss and involves sorrow.” Susan Cain changed the way we think about introverts with her first bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and now she’s going to change the way we approach some difficult feelings with Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Susan joins us on the show to talk about the thinkers and poets who influenced the new book, the veneer of effortless belonging, resolving her own grief, impermanence, collective creativity (and shifting our communal thinking), Susan David’s concept of Emotional Agility, how writing this book changed her and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Gold by Rumi

Poured Over is Produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. new episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: Susan Cain, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. I have been a fan of your work for so long. Quiet. I know it pubbed in 2010. I know that was 10 years ago, it feels like it’s always been around, and yet 10 years. But here’s the thing. You tell a great story. In the TED talk that was released around the time, Quiet was where you talk about being the kid who went to summer camp with an entire suitcase full of books.

Susan Cain: Yes, it’s true. First of all, I just want to say thank you so much for having me, Miwa. I’m so happy to be here. And yes, that thing about that story about the suitcase full of books, the aspect of that story that my kids always remember the most, they’re always reminding me of it is the part where I felt sorry for the books because I wasn’t reading them. So they’re always talking about that. And as a fellow book loving person, you understand.

B&N: Absolutely. There’s nothing worse than being on the road and running out with books to read, and it has happened, and my brother and I would swap back and forth, because you can’t run out of anything to read. Part of why I bring that up, beyond the fact that it’s a charming story about books, is you tend to travel a different kind of path in your books. I mean, quiet is not what people expected. I mean, you were arguing that being an introvert actually, is something we should aspire a little more to. And we’ve celebrated extroverts for a really long time, both in work and play school everywhere. And now your new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, I think might have a similar impact for a lot of readers. So would you set this book up for readers, please?

SC: Sure, I guess he mean a similar impact in terms of it being, I don’t know, maybe an intuitive idea that that actually on some deep level hits home, you know, and I guess I got to this book in a number of different ways, I’ll tell you one way in, which is that I come in certain ways. And I think this is true for many people from a kind of legacy of loss, some catastrophic losses on both sides of my family, but also more personal ones, I tell the story in the book of my mother and me and how we had a very blissful relationship when I was a kid that really kind of shattered during my adolescence, and was never the same again, until very recently. And it was a loss that I took very hard, so hard that for years during my adulthood, everything was going great in my adulthood, but I couldn’t speak of my mother without crying. Even if I said my mother grew up in Brooklyn, it would bring tears to my eyes. So for a while I had to not speak of her at all, I came to realize that kind of experience was not just my story, you know, it’s everyone’s story, in a way, like people would tell me about feeling like they had lost the perfect relationship, maybe the person broke up with them, or they passed away, you know, or maybe they no longer live in the country of their birth and need its music still to fall asleep at night, all kinds of stories of loss that I heard. And I started to realize, you know, that it’s no accident that the loss of the Garden of Eden is the foundational myth of our culture, and that this story of losing the garden, it’s a kind of pain of separation, that is the fundamental state of being human. But it’s not only a pain that bound into that story is always the promise of redemption. There’s always the longing to go back to Eden, there’s always the glorious promise of where that longing can carry us. And at the heart of all of it is love. And I went on this five-year quest, trying to figure out what this pain of separation was all about, and found that this longing, this sorrow, this pain of separation is actually one of the secret gateways we have that carries us to connection and creativity and love. You could even argue that it’s the wellspring of those three states: connection, creativity and love, couldn’t be what they are without our sorrows and our longings.

B&N: You can see how the threads of Bittersweet are related to your earlier work. But how did you know this was going to be your next book, the subject?

SC: My process always is that I set out to answer a question that’s deeply bothering me or following a deep instinct that I have. And in this case, the question that I could not let go of, kind of the catalyst question for this book was the response that I have had all my life to listening to sad minor key music. You know, Leonard Cohen is like my all time favorite musician. I know you love him, too. I, all my life, have had this reaction to sad music of not feeling sad at all when I listened to it. Instead, what I feel is a kind of sense of uplift, and a sense of wonder and awe that a musician could take pain and turn it into beauty. And most of all, a kind of sense of connection with the musician and with all the other people who are listening to it. It’s a kind of like beautiful acknowledgement that the state of being human involves loss and involves sorrow. And here’s the musician who’s not afraid to say so and more than that, he’s not afraid to turn it into something transcendently gorgeous. So all my life I felt this way about Add music my friends used to tease me for listening to funeral tunes like, why are you doing that? And I just couldn’t let that question go of how it could be that something is so happy and so sad at the same time. What is it in our culture that would make the act of listening to sad music feel vaguely embarrassing? So at first, I just set out to answer that question. You know, when I found that people play the happy songs on their playlists 175 times, but they play the sad songs 800 times. And other people too, it’s not just me will say that they listen to sad music, and they feel connected to all these sublime emotions. And I just needed to understand why that was. And I went on this five year quest, looking at the wisdom traditions of the world, and our art and our literature and our neuroscience all over the place. And what I realized is we have a tradition of poets and philosophers and thinkers who for 2000 years have been trying to tell us that our longing is a great gateway to belonging. So this wasn’t just my idiosyncratic reaction to bittersweet music. This is a deep and fundamental truth, and I just couldn’t let go of it.

B&N: I’m going to quote you from the book for a second because this line is so good. Longing is momentum in disguise. It’s active, not passive touch with the creative, the tender and the divine. And I had always thought of melancholy and longing as very passive states. That’s probably just my misinterpretation, for anyone who’s listening. But I do think that the idea that longing can be an active state that can push you towards change is really radical.

SC: Yes, you’re not alone in thinking of longing and melancholy as passive states. That is what our culture teaches us very incorrectly. I’ll give you a few examples of how our tradition actually contradicts this. You look at Homer’s Odyssey, it opens with the hero Odysseus who’s about to take this epic, world changing journey. It opens with him weeping on a beach longing for his native Ithaca. You look at all of our favorite children’s literature, whether it’s Harry Potter, Batman or Pippi Longstocking, almost always, the protagonist is an orphan. Why is that? Why is the protagonist an orphan, it’s because they come into the story broken and longing for completion. And it’s only once they’ve been orphaned, that the story starts that the adventure begins, that they claim their birthright. And this is because we are all of us orphaned in some kind of way. We, you know, we come into this world incomplete in some incredibly fundamental way, we’re all subjected to bereavement and breakups and plagues and wars and all of it as well as to great joy and connection and union. And the stories are trying to tell us that it’s the act of longing for that greater state. That’s actually the engine that carries us to the best things that humanity is capable of even the word longing like the vocabulary word longing, it comes from English and Germanic roots that literally mean to reach for and to grow longer. So these are very active states, they’re not passive, the way we have been taught to think.

B&N: And you mentioned vocabulary a second ago. And it seems to me that as a culture, we substitute words all the time, we interchange sadness and grief, and there is a delineation between those two states. But I think at some point in the book, you say, there are up to 27 different emotions that we can experience. And I think we can all mentally run through a list and say, okay, but I don’t think even now, as we try to move forward, I don’t think we always hit the right word, when we’re trying to describe a state that we’re in. And I think it’s really fascinating that you pull from history from science, epigenetics makes an appearance in this book. There’s a lot you talk to a lot of medical professionals as well. So when you’re researching a book like this, where do you start?

SC: There almost is no beginning and I go all over the freaking place. Once I’m transfixed by an idea the way I was with this one, I spend years walking around the world looking at it through the lens of the idea. And so every book I read, every conversation I have, every trip I take, it’s all done that way. So in this case, I went all over I mean, I explored Sufism and Buddhism, I went back to my alma mater, Princeton, to interview students in what they were and are experiencing, I went to participate in a seminar for bereavement counselors, I went to interview the director of the movie Inside Out. The great director at Pixar, Pete Doctor, to talk to him about the origins of that movie, I basically just go all over the place, and I’m trying to really understand something from a deep level.

B&N: Well, let’s go back to Princeton for a second because this idea of transgenerational effects, I think, is really important because right now, obviously, we’re still in a pandemic, but we’re coming out in a different stage. And we’re seeing all of these different age groups responding differently and with valid considerations for all of them. But I would really love to know what you learned from these college students.

SC: Oh, wow. Well, I went to Princeton because when I had been a student there, with the exception of close friends with whom, obviously, you’d share your true ourselves, it had seemed to me at the time that most of my classmates were incredibly shiny, glamorous, had a sense of innocence about them that wherever they were supposed to be, they had already arrived. And it was all good. And I wondered, knowing what I know now from the perspective of midlife, about the truth of things. I wondered, was that really true? And what would they say now, if I asked them, and I couldn’t go back in time. But what I could do was visit campus 30 years later, with the amazing magical tool of a journalist’s notebook, where you can arrive as a writer and ask any question you want, and lots of people want to chat. So I sat down with a bunch of current Princeton students. And what they told me literally, this was like two minutes into the interview, they started talking about this phenomenon that they called effortless perfection, which they told me is not a phrase just on Princeton’s campus. It’s used all over the place for college students. And it means there is a standard that you should be thin, good looking, get great grades, be socially adept, be a winner in all kinds of ways. And not only achieve all that, but appear to be doing it effortlessly. And this phrase emerged in the context of a rash of suicides that we were starting to see in the popular press where you’d see this phenomenon of a college student who would one day post an Instagram, you know, smiling and surrounded by all their friends, and, the next day, die by suicide. And like, no one could understand how these two events could go together. This phenomenon of effortless perfection kind of helps us understand what’s really happening. That’s just one kind of lens into it. But I think there’s a veneer that many of us feel obligated to wear, because we’re not allowed to express the truth of our sorrows and longings, let alone understand the power of our sorrows and longings. That’s the part that’s a real loss.

B&N: And I have to say, there’s a quiz in the introduction to Bittersweet. And yes, I did the quiz. I got a seven. And that was a little higher than I was expecting. Because these aren’t things I think about sort of in my day to day, so I get to walk to work. It’s a very nice walk. And I’m frequently struck by little things, you know, noticing that the trees happen to look very beautiful, or the light is something I noticed a lot and the light just looks beautiful. And I’d never really thought of that particular connection to bittersweetness. I always thought that was more sort of music, movies, film, but you are talking to in sort of a day to day sensory experience, which I had to sort of step back and say, Huh, right. Okay, because I’m so used to just moving through my day. And yet, they’re all of these moments.

SC: Yeah, very much. So I guess just to give people listening who haven’t seen the quiz yet, um, a sense of some of the questions that we ask. It’s questions like, do you ever draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day? Have others called you an old soul?

B&N: Do you feel elevated by sad music definitely shows.

SC: Do you react intensely to music, art and nature. And maybe it’s helpful here to describe what bittersweetness really is, is, it’s the recognition that joy and sorrow, light and dark, bitter and sweet that they are forever paired. That’s the reality of the human experience, and also a kind of acute awareness of passing time. And what you could describe as a piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It’s a joy because the world is obviously beautiful, and it’s piercing because if you’re thinking about it, you realize what it’s all impermanent. And there’s a great human challenge and what to make of that impermanence. And we are not encouraged to think of any of these things, even though they are the deep part of our experience. So part of what the book is doing is just getting people to be aware of these experiences and understanding the power in them to unleash as I say, creativity, connection, love, and we can talk about how that works.

B&N: Let’s give people some examples of that.

SC: So when it comes to creativity, for example, there was a study that was done, where the researchers took a group of subjects, and they had them make speeches to audiences that the researchers had primed in advance. So half of the people gave speeches to audiences that clapped loudly, cheered wildly, you know, looked very smiling and affirming and the other half gave speeches to audiences that looked very bored and disapproving. And as you would predict, afterwards, the people who gave speeches to the nice audiences said they felt they were in a good mood. And the people who gave speeches to the disapproving audiences were kind of down in the dumps. But also the researchers had all these speech makers, right afterwards, make a collage. They then had a group of artists rate for creativity. And what they found is that the people who had made speeches to the disapproving audiences created better collages, more creative collages. This was especially pronounced for people who had come into the whole situation already more emotionally vulnerable. So there seems to be some kind of mysterious connection between our experience with precarity. And with feeling a kind of sense of threat or sorrow, or whatever it is, and our ability to kind of dig deep and be creative. And what I believe is going on here is, when we’re doing it, right, we have the power to transform pain into beauty. And we have not just the power to do it, but we have the desire to do it, we’re like longing to do it, we come into this world with a kind of longing for a more perfect and beautiful world. And when you look at what creativity really is, it’s trying to reach a world that is better. So the more you’re trying to understand what the drawbacks are in the current situation, the more your creative impulse is going to be stimulated. And I’m not trying to say in any regard that this means that we should or would need to become depressive, in order to be creative. It’s more that being in tune with the natural balance of joy and sorrow and given life, that that’s the real engine. So that’s just one example.

B&N: My first thought, as we were sitting down to talk this morning is how did writing this book change you?

SC: Oh, so many ways. I mean, one way is that the grief that I started this book with the one that I told you about with my mother, that grief became largely resolved. This is partly because in her older age, we really have come to a pretty deep resolution between us. But it’s also because there is something about the process of, I guess I keep coming back to that idea, you know, whatever pain you can’t get rid of make it your creative offering, there is something about that act of transforming a pain into some kind of positive act that has a way of resolving the pain. And I didn’t expect that. But it was really true. It sounded like one of those cliches of catharsis, someone even told me, Oh, maybe writing this book will resolve and at the time, they said that to me early on in the process, and I thought, yeah, yeah, that’s one of those things. That sounds kind of sappy and nice. But it was actually true.

B&N: There’s a great story you have of a friend of yours who’s a violinist, and her Stradivarius was stolen. And unfortunately, because the price shot up when it came back on the market, she couldn’t actually buy her instrument back. But she said something really interesting to you, or she’s like, well, but I realized that playing this new instrument, I was not the same musician. And I didn’t want to be the same person that I had already changed. And there’s so many examples like that. You tell a great story. It was Leonard Cohen memorial concert that you went to in Montreal, would you tell that story? The change that happens by the end of it is pretty great.
SC: Yeah. I have loved Leonard Cohen for decades to the point of I don’t know about obsession, but I really love him. So a year after he passed away, his son made a memorial concert in Montreal, and I live on the east coast of the US. My kids were pretty young, at the time. My husband said we should take the family and go to Montreal so I could attend this concert. And I was really appreciative that he said that, and I accepted the generous offer. But I also felt completely ridiculous getting the whole family on a plane on a Monday afternoon, just so I could attend a concert. We did it. And then I got to the concert and felt even more ridiculous as it began because it was a memorial concert. It wasn’t Leonard Cohen himself. So it was all these famous musicians who had gathered there in his honor. And I was just listening to them at first you feeling like who are these people? They’re not really Leonard Cohen. I’d much rather be sitting at home listening to him on YouTube, so I could hear his voice, his sound. And then onto the stage came a musician named Damien Rice, who performed probably the gloomiest of Cohen’s many gloomy songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, also the best I would say, of his songs. And not only did he perform it beautifully, but he ended the song with this magnificent, naked, musical lamentation. And it was so stirring and so profound, it was like the audience just rose to its feet as he lamented before us. And I just had this crazy moment of transcendence as this was happening, you know, this feeling of the deepest possible connection to the audience and to Leonard Cohen and to Damien Rice, who was singing and to whatever is lamentation was, was like he had unlocked something and all of us and everybody could feel it. And, you know, the next day, I kind of looked up the reviews of the concert and everybody was talking about that one moment, and there was something about him being willing to bear his soul of whatever it was that was troubling him and transform it into beauty in the way that he did. That’s just like, okay, that reaches the heights like he touched the heavens at that moment. And we all did, and I think we’ve all had these kinds of experiences. We’re not even aware of it, you know, like we go to a concert looking for those kinds of moments, but we’re not even aware of what it is we’re looking for. But that’s it.

B&N: You follow up that story in the book with some evidence from a researcher at Hopkins, David Yaden. Yaden has found that it’s precisely during such times including career changes, divorces in the ultimate transition of death, that we’re more likely to experience meaning communion and transcendence. This is not only for those whose loved ones are dying, but also for the dying themselves, which I mean, Leonard Cohen, incredible musical experience, but to be able to take this into the scientific realm, and transition then into what I also wasn’t quite expecting, but you’re saying creativity grows with age that sometimes we think as a culture that the older we get sort of creativity ebbs and continues to ebb, and you’re saying, Oh, no, wait, there are different stages that come with this kind of transcendence, and Yaden’s work is part of that. Can we talk about that for a minute?

SC: Yeah, absolutely. I think what happens as we age as we become more aware of all these forces of bittersweetness that I happened to be articulating in the book, but whether they’re articulated or not, we’re operating according to these forces. So the creativity researcher, Dean Simonton, for example, looked at Athenian and Shakespearean plays and found that as the playwrights age, the plays became more profound, more spiritual in their orientation. And of course, this is because of a growing appreciation as we get older of the impermanence of life. And David Yaden’s research, what he’s really talking about, is he saying that in moments of transition, which you could rephrase as moments of impermanence, at moments of impermanence, that’s when we become aware, in a heightened kind of way of our connection to others to the world around us. This is buried so deep into our wisdom traditions to I mean, if you look at different religions, the ceremonies and the rituals are all based at moments of transition. Whether it’s the equinoxes, or like in the Jewish tradition, it’s really interesting, you know that the Jewish holidays tend to start not at the beginning of a day, they start at nightfall, and then they carry through to sundown the next day. It’s as if what the tradition is telling us is that the moment of Nightfall is not the disaster that we think it is, you know, that transition from day into night, we might experience that as the onset of darkness. But really, it’s kind of like the proverbial darkness before dawn, in more ancient tribes practices where when a boy turns into a man, the boy is literally interred into the ground, and then dug out to be reborn, there’s always this process of going through an extreme transition in order to witness the rebirth. You know, again, when you start looking at the religions that you might have been raised with, you’re like, oh, gosh, yeah, that was what was going on the whole time. We don’t tend to think about that, and what it means for our personal lives, in terms of all the transitions and all the upsets that we go through, are we really thinking this is tied to rebirth, this sorrow is the flip side of joy. We don’t tend to realize that even though it’s true.

B&N: But we get to a point now in the book that really surprised me, you went to talk to a group of people who don’t believe they want to die ever, and that in fact, humans should live forever. I know, intellectually, there are people who have a hard time with the concept of death and will fight it to the very end and don’t really want to age or I really wasn’t expecting the I’m not going to die contingent, in this particular. But I think it’s important to raise only because, well, one, it is kind of charmingly weird. But also these folks are really committed, they’re okay with impermanence, but yet they’re not. So let’s go visit these folks for a second.

SC: Absolutely. I don’t know that they are okay with impermanence. I mean, I would say that the reason that I went to visit them and talk to so many of them, I mean, partly they’re just fascinating, but also, they seem to me the extreme embodiments of a culture that’s not comfortable with impermanence, you know? And what they would say to you is, yeah, this idea of there being a beauty and impermanence the way I’m saying, they would say, well, that’s the kind of story that you tell yourself, if you have no choice. If you have no choice but to die, then you’re going to invent that kind of story. But we are a group of committed technologists. And we think that we can vastly delay aging and death, if not, eradicate it altogether. And once you look at that reality, do you still believe that there’s something to this idea of a beauty and impermanence and I found that to be an incredibly challenging, in a good way, kind of mindset. You know, it sort of stopped me in my tracks when I heard that. I don’t think it convinced me at the end of the day, though, I would say sure, like, if you could tell me that I think probably most of us that we could have another 50 or 100 or 300 years of healthy lifespan, wouldn’t you want it? You probably would. Well, first of all, I’m not sure I believe that we could really get to the point of delaying this reality forever. But what is also true i believe is that there’s something about the fact that we are all in this same situation of impermanence together, that we all face this fate. There’s something about that that has the power to connect us in a way that other realities don’t. And I don’t think we tap into that power enough. And that’s part of what I’m trying to alert people to in the book.

B&N: I mean, in a way, the new book, Bittersweet, is really about a form of collective creativity, if you would like just trying to shift our communal thinking, not just our individual thinking, but sort of take us to, I don’t want to say an entirely new way of thinking, because it makes perfect sense to say there’s always this balance, right? There’s the sweet with the bitter, the sad with the happy. But is it enough for one of us to shift our thinking? Or do we really have to do this kind of on mass? Or can we all just sort of chip away at our own pace?

SC: I think we need to do it on mass, because it’s not only about creativity, it’s also about connection, which if there’s anything that we’re lacking, right now, it’s connection, we’re probably in the most profoundly tribal eyes time in American history. But also, you see this happening globally. And I don’t think we realize the extent to which sorrow itself is connective tissue. It’s a bridge that we can be walking from one human to another. And I talk in the book about evolutionarily speaking. So Darwin had noticed this from the very beginning, Darwin was this really interesting character, he’s known for being the survival of the fittest guy. But he was actually an incredibly gentle and melancholic type of person who was horrified by the cruelty that he saw in animals and in people. But he also noticed that alongside that cruelty, all these mammals and humans also had a kind of compassionate instinct, which he actually believed was the stronger of the two impulses. And he traces it to the need for mothers to respond to the tears of their infants. And basically what happens is, if you’re a being who can respond to the tears of babies, you also have that ability to respond to the cries and to the vulnerability of other beings as well. And again, if that sounds sort of pie in the sky, sappy to you? Well, there’s been a lot of studies, for example, when by a great psychologist named Dr. Keltner, who looked at the vagus nerve, this is the largest bundle of nerves in our body, it regulates mechanisms as fundamental as our breathing or sex drive, our digestion. And your vagus nerve also responds when you see another person in distress. That’s amazing. When you think about it, the same bodily function that regulates your breathing and your eating also is priming you to feel a sense of her and compassion when you see another being in distress. So this is something very basic that we have the power to tap into. And we just need new mechanisms of how to do it?

B&N: It’s the intersection of compassion and bittersweetness.

SC: Yeah, and you know, as I say, in the subtitle of the book, it’s how sorrow and longing can make us whole. And the sorrow piece is a piece that I think we shouldn’t neglect. And yet we do. I mean, there’s a one organizational psychologist whose name is Jason Countoff. And he did a study where he looked at the language that we use in the workplace. And he found that when people are anxious, they say that they’re frustrated. And when they’re sad, they say that they’re angry. So they’re like disguising their true emotions with emotions, that sound supposedly more empowered, which you get, of course, like, you understand why people do that, but there’s a collective disempowerment that goes on when we’re leaving all those emotions out of the picture.

B&N: Okay, so again, vocabulary. This thread, this idea that we keep flipping words, and substituting words for moments where we don’t want to admit our sort of true state. And there’s a researcher called Susan David, who has a concept called Emotional Agility, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like the idea that you can sit with the discomfort and use it to move to a better state. And one of the things though, and I think this is from a TED talk, she’s got dead people goals. And I love the phrasing of this. And what she says is only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts never experienced the disappointment that comes with failure. And I think this is incredibly important, because we’re in a moment where it feels like there are very few people who can sit with any kind of discomfort. And again, this idea of substituting vocabulary to help sort of push away instead of you know, and it’s a cliche for a reason, but the only way through, is through. I really love the idea of dead people goals, because here we are being human.

SC: Yeah. And it’s interesting that you focus on the dead people goals, because the immediate image that came into my mind is a seminar that Susan David gave that I attended. It was a seminar that people in the audience it was a bunch of extremely, extremely high powered people, most of them from Silicon Valley. People, who if you saw them striding into a boardroom, they would be like the grownup equivalent of those Princeton students I was talking about from years ago. You know, people just seem like they’ve got it all together. And she does an exercise where I won’t go through all the details of it. But basically, you talk about a feeling that you have about yourself that is bothering you, or a pain that you’re struggling with, and you put it on a post-it and you’re imagining, like walking around the room wearing this formerly secret emotion or experience, on a post-it on your chest, it was so interesting to hear the reactions of people to that experience, because they were saying things like, This feels like the most real thing that I’ve talked about at this conference, and that they didn’t want to stop talking about it. And it’s not surprising that people would react that way. Because Susan also did a study of 70,000 people where she found that a full third of them say that they judge themselves for having any kind of negative emotion, whether it’s shame or grief.

B&N: You know, we spend some time with researchers, we spent time with the science, we’ve talked about vocabulary, there is a spiritual piece to this as well. You’ve learned to meditate, it sounds like from the book, but also, Rumi’s poetry makes more than one appearance in the text here. And it’s something that you come back to. And I’d really just like to spend a few minutes with you on both of those things. Because clearly, you have had this transformation that you’ve talked about, certainly with your relationship with your mother. But there seems to be more happening here than just that.

SC: Yeah. So you’re a very astute reader. I came in not only to this book, but just to the experience of thinking about these questions. I came in as a lifelong, deep agnostic when it comes to spirituality. And I guess I’m still agnostic, but I think about it in a very different way now, which is to say that I have started to realize that this longing that I believe is the core fundamental experience of all humans. Well, when you look at it religiously, let’s say it’s a longing for God. We call it a longing for Eden, we might call it in Judaism, a longing for Zion in Islam, a longing for Mecca. Sufis call it Rumi, you just mentioned as one of the great Sufi poets, I call it the longing for the beloved of the soul. That longing gets expressed in 1000 different ways. So for some people, it’s explicitly religious, but it’s also what CS Lewis called before he became a committed Christian the inconsolable longing for we know not what. And that’s the longing that we feel when we hear sad music. It’s a kind of longing for a more perfect and beautiful world. It’s the same longing that we see expressed in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, what is she longing for, for somewhere over the rainbow, she’s longing for home, you look at an iconic advertisement, the kind we know so well, for magazine ads of the shiny convertible that’s driving around a bend to nowhere. And we think the focus of the ad is the car itself. But really, the focus of the ad is the place around the corner, the beautiful place to which the car is driving that we can only imagine but never quite reach. That state of longing, I’ve come to believe is the heart of humanity, because psychology tends to be staffed by atheists or agnostics, it is kind of blind to this impulse. But you know, I happen to be sitting here at my desk as you asked me this question. So I’m going to pull a Rumi poem down from my wall. I’m going to read it to you. But first, I’m going to set it up. This is a poem where he’s talking about a man who is praying to Allah. And then a cynic comes along and says, Why are you doing that? Why are you bothering? Have you ever gotten an answer back? And the man thinks, no, you know, I never did get an answer back. And so he stops praying. And then he meets Khidr, who is the guide of souls, and says to him, why did you stop praying? I’m going to read this excerpt from the poem is longing for God, this longing you express is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union, your pure sadness that wants help, is the secret cup. And this is up on my wall, because I believe this is the deepest truth, whether you believe in the gods of the ancient books or not, it makes absolutely no difference. Your longing is still the return message. Your pure sadness that wants help is still the secret cup. And the grief, our shared grief, is what draws us towards union period. And this is probably the deepest truth that we have of our 2000 years of traditions and yet, when are we ever taught it?

B&N And all of those combined to push us forward and change?

SC: Yes, they do. Because, it’s because of this kind of longing that we create and change and like reach for each other in the first place. I mean, when you long for unconditional love when you long for the arms of your partner who you’re in love with, when you long to build a rocket to Mars, it is all the same impulse impulse to get to this more perfect and more beautiful world, you know, to get to somewhere over the rainbow. So this is like the great animating engine of you Humanity to come back to where we started. It’s not the passive thing that our culture is telling us. It’s exactly precisely the opposite.

B&N: And it’s a really exciting journey. It’s right in front of us. Bittersweet is here. It is in stores. Now, Susan Cain, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

SC: Thank you so, so much for having me. And for being such an incredibly thoughtful conversationalist. I really appreciate it.

B&N: Before I let you go back to your life, there’s one thing I want to bring up, because you mentioned that experiment where people gave speeches to different kinds of crowds. And this is not exactly parallel. But you did deliver a TED talk in 2019, on the whole idea of bittersweet, the reception was not maybe what I would have expected.

SC: It was just really interesting. I gave that talk, as you say, in the summer of 2019. So that was the summer right before the pandemic started, you know, before we ever dreamed that this big thing was headed our way. Before many of the challenges that we faced over these last two years or so. The talk, by the way, is being released along with the book, even though I gave it two years ago. So on March 22, it will be available. So it’s just very interesting, because I felt when I gave that talk as if half the audience just completely got it right away. They’re like, Oh, my God, that’s me. This is how I’ve thought and lived all my life. I never thought about it, put it into words. And the other half, a lot of these people are friends of mine, people I knew in the audience like I came off the stage, and they were like, wow, you know, I didn’t know you were so depressive. I don’t think that that second half of the audience would have reacted that way today. I don’t think they would have, I think there was not then the same recognition of the pairing of joy and sorrow. So I think that second half of the audience was kind of saying, what the heck. Life is pretty good. Why are you going on about sorrow and longing. And what I would say to that, the flip side of that is, if you can see that, in every beautiful summer July field of poppies, if you can see that, that that beautiful field of flowers, is all about impermanence. And it’s about the inevitable sorrow of its passing. You also have the power to see that when you’re in a situation like the one that we’re in now, where things are not as good, and they’re not as easy that the flipside of that is also its joy and its rebirth. We may not be experiencing it at this moment. But this is a duality that doesn’t stop. If I could go back and talk to that second half of the audience. I think I would point that out today.

B&N: Change is possible and bittersweet is part of change. Susan Cain, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

SC: Thank you so much, Miwa for having me.