Susan Cain: The idea of bittersweetness
is that we live in a constant state,
all humans do,
it's a constant state
of a kind of existence simultaneously
of joy and sorrow, dark and light,
bitter and sweet.
And then what comes with that
is a heightened awareness
of impermanence in all things,
and also a kind of curiously piercing joy
at the beauty of the world.
Because there's something
about having this deep awareness
that the joy comes with sorrow,
the sorrow comes with joy,
that makes us really attuned
to the insane beauty all around us.
You know, I think the Stoics
come at that from one point of view.
You know, there's the stoic idea
of, they would call it memento mori,
to remember all the time
that we could die tomorrow,
we don't know what's going to happen.
And that's a way of both calming us down
and also making life feel
a little more precious.
So you know, the Stoics come at it
from that point of view.
I don't know that I think of myself
as a Stoic explicitly,
but I do feel there's something
about being aware of life's fragility
that situates us exactly
where we should be.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers:
Why do you think
art is a way that we see
bittersweetness being expressed
really masterfully?
SC: I believe that all humans ...
That the most fundamental
aspect of our humanity
is that we all have a kind of
longing for a state
that I call the perfect
and beautiful world.
You know, like in "The Wizard of Oz,"
it's called "somewhere over the rainbow,"
all religions have their own name for it,
my favorite is the Sufi name
of the beloved of the soul.
And what creativity really is
at the end of the day
is an expression of that longing
for a more perfect and beautiful world.
You know, what an artist
or a musician is doing,
is they're having a vision of ...
You know, the gap between
the world that we're in
and the world that they longed to be in
and therefore to create.
And so whether you're talking
about a violin piece or a rocket to Mars,
there's really no difference
between those two things.
Like, the word longing itself,
the etymology of it literally means
to reach for, you know,
to grow longer and to reach for.
And that's what we're doing
when we're creative.
And I do want to hasten to say that ...
You don't need to compose a symphony
that people are going to be listening to
hundreds of years later.
You don't have to build the rocket to Mars
in order to express
that fundamental human creativity.
You could be sitting at home
and drawing a picture or baking a pie.
It doesn't really matter.
Like, all these different actions
are expressions of our longing
and of our better nature.
I believe that the art and the music
and the nature and religion
and spirituality
are all just different
manifestations of the same thing.
And what that thing is, we probably
all have to define for ourselves,
but it is the most fundamental
drive in all of human nature.
And I believe our best one, you know,
it's the one that leads to creativity,
but also to connection and to love.
Like, I literally -- sorry to go on
with this question,
but I literally have sitting taped up
in front of me in my office right now ...
A quotation from the poet
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī,
who was a Sufi poet,
and I'm going to quote it for you,
but I'm just going to set
the context of the poem.
It's basically ...
It’s about a man who is praying to Allah,
and a cynical person
comes along and asks him,
"Why are you praying?
You never got an answer back, did you?
So why are you praying?"
And the man thinks about it
and is troubled
by the cynic's observation.
And he falls into a fitful sleep during
which he's visited by Khidr,
the guide of souls, who says to him,
"Why did you stop praying?"
And he said, "Well, you know,
God never answered me,
Allah never answered."
And this is what Khidr
says to him, he says,
and now I'm quoting from the poem itself,
"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 I have this taped up in my office
because I believe that ...
I believe that that's the truth,
whether we consider ourselves atheists
or believers or somewhere in between.
To me, is a false dichotomy.
WPR: It's beautiful.
Can you share a little bit more
about the process
that went into writing this book
and how you ultimately found yourself
in this place where bittersweet
was the end product?
SC: As most of us do,
I come from a heritage of love and loss.
In my case,
most members of my family,
the previous generations,
were killed in the Holocaust.
On my mother's side and my father's side.
You know, I explore in the book
the whole phenomenon of inherited grief,
how it transmits to us,
both culturally and epigenetically.
And so I think that that's a kind of
unconscious backdrop
that had been with me from the beginning.
Of just having a sense
of kind of, like a tragic view of life,
but also a view that I kind of,
just can't believe
how beautiful it is sometimes.
So I'm sort of holding
those two things at the same time.
And yeah, so I just had
all these questions
about how to make sense
of this paradox of life.
And so I just went off
on this five-year journey.
I mean, I went and talked to Pete Docter,
who is the director at Pixar,
who created the movie "Inside Out,"
which is a movie that's really
all about sadness
and the positive value
that sadness has in our lives.
And as I say, I explored
all these wisdom traditions.
I went and talked to neuroscientists.
I spent a lot of time with a psychologist
named Dacher Keltner,
who's done all this fascinating,
groundbreaking work on what he calls
your inner compassionate instinct
and how we're basically
evolutionarily designed
to react to the sadness of other beings.
And this comes from the fact
that we're creatures
who have to take care of our young
like, we don't survive
if we don't do that.
And so that means that we're primed
to respond to the cries of babies.
Except it radiates out from there.
We don't only respond
to our own baby's tears,
we end up responding to other babies,
and we also end up responding
to other beings in general.
And we definitely do not get this right,
because we also, as Darwin had noticed,
Darwin said, we have this deep,
compassionate instinct,
but we also have obviously this propensity
to these astonishing acts of cruelty.
So both of these things are part of us.
And ...
And the question becomes,
how do we most draw
on the compassionate side
of our deeper instincts?
WPR: There's a question here from Miriam
where they ask just about how
we can be present for each other
as we're feeling different emotions.
The question specifically is,
"Can we be fully present for one another
if one is experiencing sadness
and the other is happiness?"
SC: Yeah, I think the answer is to be
fully present for each other.
And I'll tell you one little hack
that I've developed for that.
I don’t know if hack is the right word.
But there’s this amazing video
that went viral a few years ago.
It was put out by the Cleveland
Clinic Hospital.
And this was a video
that they put together
to teach empathy to their caregivers.
And the way they did this,
is they had a camera kind of,
moving through the corridors
of the hospital,
lingering for a moment on the face
of this passer-by or that passer-by.
Just the way you do in normal life, right?
You're like, walking through
and you just see people as you go
and you’re not really thinking
that much about it.
Except that in the case of this video,
they had little captions
underneath each random person
that you were passing by.
And sometimes the captions
were joyful ones,
like, "just learned that he's going to be
a father for the first time."
But because we're in a hospital,
more often the captions are not so joyful.
And it's things like, you know,
caption under a little girl saying
goodbye to her father for the last time.
It's things like that.
And you cannot watch this video
without tearing up.
It's impossible.
Which is why it went viral.
You also become aware,
as you're watching it,
you're not only tearing up,
you literally are having the sensation
of expanding chest muscles.
Like, you can feel it
physically and literally.
And ...
And we actually know
from the work of Dacher Keltner,
who I was just talking about,
that we have our vagus nerve,
which is the biggest bundle
of nerves in our body,
and it governs our most
fundamental instincts,
like breathing and digestion.
You know it's really basic.
But your vagus nerve
also responds and fires up
when it sees somebody else in distress.
So you know, this is a very deep
and fundamental impulse.
And what I take from the lesson
of that Cleveland Clinic video
is just the simple exercise of imagining
what people's captions are
as you walk through the world.
You know, you don't necessarily know them.
But now I'll go into a grocery store
and as the person's
ringing up my groceries,
I'm thinking, what's her caption?
What is it?
And it's a completely different way
of interacting with people
once you do that.
WPR: And connected to this,
Gordon asks how your experience
with the pandemic and lockdown
informed the writing of the book.
Did it change the book
from what you initially
envisioned it to be?
SC: My father and my brother
actually passed away from COVID
quite early during the pandemic.
There's something about grappling
with these subjects for years,
as I had been doing,
that actually helped me pass
through those particular moments
and weather those particular moments.
I guess I'll just give you
one specific example.
So one of the wisdom traditions
that I found most illuminating,
and I wrote about this in the book,
it's the one that Leonard Cohen's
song comes from, you know,
the idea of light coming
from the crack in everything.
So he got that from the Kabbalah,
which is the mystical side
of the Jewish tradition.
And one of the fundamental
stories in the Kabbalah is the idea
that all of creation originally
was one divine vessel of light
that ultimately shattered
and that now we're living in the world
after the shattering.
But these divine shards of light
are still scattered all around us,
and they're buried
in the mud all around us.
And so our job is
to walk through the world
and pick up the shards where we can
and maybe shine them up a little bit.
And the beauty is that I'm going
to see one set of shards,
but you're going to notice
completely different ones.
So we all go around and pick up our own.
When my father passed away from COVID,
I started reflecting on his life and ...
My father was a person who ...
He was a doctor
and a med school professor,
and he worked really,
really hard and did great work.
And at the same time that he did all that,
he also would perform these,
you could call them
senseless acts of beauty, maybe.
He loved orchids,
so he built a greenhouse
full of orchids in our basement.
For really no reason
other than that he loved orchids.
And so he grew them and gazed at them.
And he loved the French language,
so he learned how to speak French,
even though he had no time
to visit France and rarely did.
But he would sit there and learn it
and loved the act of learning it.
And there were so many different
things like this that he did.
And when he died, I started thinking
about all those acts of beauty
that he had performed in his work
and in these seemingly
senseless acts of beauty.
And I framed them all as shards
that he had been picking up all his life.
And ...
That was, yeah, that was a really
helpful way of thinking of him
and remembering him
and bringing me to some form
of peace with his loss.
WPR: As we slowly come out
of the pandemic,
how can we better normalize
talking about loss
and talking about these feelings
that you've mentioned
our culture sort of shies away from?
SC: Well, I think it's really helpful
to start in our organizations.
I mean, we can obviously start privately,
which in some ways is the easiest
because we don't have to corral
anybody else to do it.
But in our organizations,
there are small steps that we can take.
So I'm thinking, for example,
I do a lot of public speaking,
lately Zoom talks, where I come in
and talk about introversion
and I guess now bittersweetness.
Anyway, I did one not that long ago,
it was a Zoom call.
And we were talking
about the power of introverts.
And the call started with a chat,
just the way this one did.
And the organizer asked them questions
like, "How's everybody feeling today?"
And everybody typed in, you know,
"I'm feeling great."
"I'm feeling excited,"
"I'm feeling joyful,"
feeling all these things.
And I love it.
If they were in fact
feeling that way, that's awesome.
And I also ask, what is the chance
that everybody truly was feeling that way?
This long list of people
coming into the chat,
what's the chance that was accurate?
Maybe zero percent?
I would love to see us develop ways,
and maybe the way to start
is with anonymous chats
or an option to be anonymous in chats,
but for organizers and for team leaders
and so on to be asking,
"What are you all truly feeling?"
"What are you going through right now?"
And again, maybe anonymous and maybe not.
When we're gathering in person,
we could have whiteboards up.
In schools they sometimes do this
and they call it a parking lot,
where people could just write down
what they're going through that day,
the joys and the sorrows,
so that people start becoming aware
of kind of like, the normality
of what actual experience is.
We as a society need to figure out
how we can start telling the truth
of what it's like to be alive.
That's what I would say.
I mean, that's actually
the reason I write books,
that's how I always think of it.
It's like there's really no point
other than telling a truth
that isn't otherwise
being spoken out loud.
And there's also an incredible
safety in numbers, you know.
Once lots of people start
talking about the same thing,
it suddenly becomes OK
to tell that particular truth
of what it's like to be alive.
So we have to just find ways of telling it
and then more and more
people will share it.
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