Bittersweet (Susan Cain)

 

Susan Cain has done it again. This is another brilliant book. It has gospel truths in it focused on how life cannot be wonderful without the terrible and sad parts. I remember when Destiny was born silently how people tried to cheer me up and tell me how grateful I must be <insert a number of different things....have two healthy children.....know that we will have our children with us in the eternities....etc> but I didn't find my solace in those things, even though I did realize how important they were. I needed that time for sadness and grief. Sometimes I still do.  Too often people in North America (and in my religion) are far too uncomfortable with sadness. We are kind of expected to see the bright side and simply be happy. There is a place for the sadness, sorrow and longing though. I need this sorrow and sadness and longing for many things, perhaps most of all, to remind me that life is fragile and to appreciate it. This book reminds me again that it is okay to get what I need. It's okay to long for something that is lost or just simply never was.

There's a lot to this book. I'd definitely find it worthwhile to read it again.


Goodreads says:

In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.

With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.