Betty Firth

Do you feel elevated by sad music? Do you find comfort or inspiration on a rainy day? Do you tear up easily at touching TV commercials? In conversations with close friends, are you drawn to talking about their past or current troubles?
These questions are part of a quiz that measures the inclination toward experiencing the bittersweet state explored by Susan Cain in her book, “Bittersweet – How sorrow and longing make us whole.” She had long appreciated music that others considered sad or funereal; she felt awed by the artists’ abilities to transform pain into something beautiful. She realized that her choices actually express longing and sorrow, which resonated with something deep inside her. She felt filled with love and a deep connection with others in the world who knew the sorrow the music expressed. She named this melancholic feeling “bittersweet: acute feelings of longing, poignancy, and sorrow combined with piercing joy at the beauty of the world and an awareness of how fleeting time is.”
One who reacts to these feelings may literally feel their chest muscles expanding, opening the heart, as when looking at a beautiful work of art or exquisite sunset. Cain says it’s the closest she has come to experiencing transcendence, “a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all.”
If you answered “yes” to those questions, you may be one who is a “connoisseur of where light and dark meet; those who are attuned to the gap between the world as it is and the way we wish it would be.”
Reading her book, I saw myself mirrored as someone who has carried an existential sadness within. Her experiences and research delving into the depths of how and why we humans experience longing and sorrow concurrently with joy and awe reflect the intrigued questioning that poets, philosophers, and other creatives have had throughout human existence. C.S. Lewis wrote throughout his life of the “the insoluble longing for we know not what.”
Despite where you fall on the spectrum, the research and volumes written about the phenomenon indicate that it is a universal experience for humans to feel the poignancy of contradictory feelings and the sharpened focus and appreciation of things that are fleeting, such as when you or someone you love is dying, a friend is moving, or your child leaves home.
Dacher Kelner, who runs two of the world’s most influential positive psychology labs, sees himself as a highly sensitive person or “high reactive” with a nervous system that responds more intensely to life’s stimuli. He recognized that sadness was at the core of who he was due to childhood experiences, and he was inspired to study human emotions. He discovered that we respond to the pain of others exactly as we do to our own pain, as observed in reactions in the brain and vagus nerve, which he named “the compassionate instinct.” The vagus nerve is our longest nerve, connecting the brainstem to the heart, lung, and digestive tract, essential to digestion, heart rate, sex, reproduction, breathing, immune responses––and caring. So, our connection is triggered by our shared experiences of sadness, not love as some might expect, and it is, indeed, hard-wired into our very core.
Leonard Cohen didn’t consider himself religious, but he drew inspiration from the Kabbalah, the mystical version of Judaism which teaches that all of creation was once a vessel filled with holy light. When it shattered, the shards of divinity were scattered everywhere, amidst the pain and ugliness; it became our task to gather up the fragments wherever we find them. Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, said Leonard’s whole life was about this thesis. You can hear it in the song “Anthem:” “Ring the bells that still can ring; forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
While this topic is deeply fascinating to me, I am wondering about this shared phenomena as it applies to our current political situation in our country. It is widely recognized that this country is deeply polarized to an extent rarely seen before, and that it has paralyzed some of the mechanisms that keep a democracy functioning, such as the willingness to have civil discussions, to seek compromises, and to work together for the sake of the common good.
While it baffles me that people, such as our president and his followers, can so transparently continue to take actions motivated by greed for money and power with no regard for the common good and still have any support from anyone, I still have faith that most of us are at heart good people.
I see people around me all the time who are volunteering in many ways throughout our town, supporting organizations and helping people out locally as well as victims of natural disasters and political upheaval in other parts of the world. I personally was grateful to receive help from friends during my recovery from surgery.
Many people may be easily misled by the intentional lies and disinformation spewed out daily by our government, but I continue to believe that we have more in common than we have differences. We share this phenomenon of mixed feelings of longing and awe, of sorrow and joy, yearning for how we wish it would be, which touches us at our deepest levels throughout our lives and connects us with each other.
Some describe this as a longing for God or the Beloved, as the Sufis express it in their poignant poetry. Some explain it in terms of longing for a soul mate that will complete themself, although the search for earthly solutions to this longing usually prove unsatisfactory, including the expectation that someone perfect is going to “fix” everything in our lives. Even those who are atheist or agnostic recognize it is an experience that transcends our solitary existence, leading to the feeling of connection with “all” –– which might mean all of humanity, all living beings, or the whole cosmos. However, we understand it or attempt to describe it, we share the longing for we know not what.
So, I am wondering how we can reach more deeply into that universal connection, recognize the goodness we all carry within us, and rebuild trust in each other. Can we let down our polarized armor just for a moment and believe that our hearts and spirits are connected? I believe we want the same basic things for a good life for ourselves and our families. We may disagree fiercely on some things, but can’t we agree that it’s reasonable to work together to attain that for all of us?