85. Susan Cain Says Sadness is a Superpower

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Okay, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

I have been waiting for this day.

This is my day to shine.

This

is a great idea.

I mean, we have a guest.

I don't know if it's your day to shine.

Right, right, right.

We do have a very, very special guest who I actually believe is a beautiful genius.

But before we bring her on, I want to tell you that the reason I'm so happy today is because we're talking about being sad.

And sad is my people's happy.

Okay.

So I have been sad my entire life.

Okay.

Want, want, want.

No, not want, want, want.

Okay.

It's not the kind of sad that needs to be cheered up.

Okay.

It's the kind of sadness that I have always seen as an appropriate and respectful and honoring response to living this brutiful life alongside all of these stunningly beautiful human beings on this harrowing.

Brutiful planet.

Yeah.

Can you please tell people what brutiful means?

Cause you're kind of right.

So brutiful is the word that's in untamed.

And I think I figured out when I was first getting sober, which meant that everything that is beautiful is also brutal.

Life is brutal and beautiful at the same time.

If you don't accept the beauty, you don't get the brutal.

If you don't, but if you don't accept the brutal, you don't get the beauty.

So it's just life is brutiful all at once and you just have to take it all.

And if there's no word, Glennon will create one.

Right.

I like to make words.

The deal is that I've always been sad and I have have always felt like happy people were just sort of deluded and irresponsible and woefully uninformed.

So weird that you married one.

I know.

Now I feel a little bit differently.

I don't think that all happy people are sociopaths anymore.

But when I was a tween and then a teenager, I used to sit in front of therapists over and over again for years and years who were trying to figure out why I was sad.

But we were like Jedi mind tricking each other because I was trying to figure out why they were not sad.

Okay.

So like when they'd tell me that I was depressed or anxious, I would think, okay, maybe, probably, but, or maybe we're just both going to die and everyone we both love is going to die for certain.

And so maybe of the two of us, I'm just the one who's paying closer attention.

Okay.

Perhaps,

but fine.

Depressed.

In our culture, though, it's not happiness, but sadness that's shameful.

So for the first half of my life, I got very sick trying to numb all of my sad.

And when I got sober at 25, the booze disappeared and what was left was the sad.

Yeah, that's a real kicker.

Right?

So I didn't have any other choice but to figure out how to use it.

So I started writing books and serving through Together Rising to act on my sad.

And Together Rising's stated mission is to turn heartbreak into action,

which is really just kind of like turning sad into beauty.

And I slowly discovered that sadness is not a problem to be solved.

But in Susan Kane's own words

from her new

earth-shattering book called Bittersweet,

Susan Kane says that sadness is, in fact, a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition, an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed and stubbornly beautiful world.

And many of you, pod squatters, are like me.

There's many listeners here who live in the minor key,

who would, like me, describe themselves as Midnight Blue.

So, Susan Kane, I have invited you here to connect our Bittersweet pod squatters to the storied tradition of Bittersweetness to tell them that they are not alone and that perhaps they were, in fact, made for just such a time as this.

So now I am happy to introduce you to the woman who introduced me to myself with Quiet and has now done it again with Bittersweet.

Susan Kane is the author of the bestseller's Quiet, Quiet Journal, Quiet Power, The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

God,

yes.

Shut up, world.

A moment of quiet, please, which spent seven years on the New York Times bestseller list.

I just, that is

utterly insane.

Unbelievable.

Seven years.

She is an honors graduate of Princeton.

Who is it, you know, and Harvard Law School, real quick.

And her record-smashing TED Talk has been viewed over 40 million times because all the introverts just stayed home and watched it over and over again so they didn't have to go out.

And her new book, Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, is out today.

Susan Kane, thank you for leading my people.

Well, thank you so, so much for having me.

I'm just hugest fans of all of you.

And I have been so looking forward to this for so long because Glennon, I knew how much you get it and

also like how much all of your people get it.

So this is just like, you know, as you said, I feel like I am with my people and so happy to be here.

Oh, we're so grateful.

As you were giving that amazingly warm and generous intro, and thank you so much for that.

What I was thinking of is that

if i had had my druthers probably i would have called this book the happiness of melancholy because that's how i always thought about it and then you know the marketing people in my life were like well you really can't use the word melancholy because that will turn too many people off but That's really, in a way, the state that I'm describing.

And I feel like you were describing it too in your intro of this mysterious state that we can get into where you're kind of aware of the tragedy of life but there's something about the fact that life is also so incredibly beautiful and that we're all wrapped together we all have this same experience of of the tragedy and the beauty happening simultaneously at every moment there's something about the connection of that that we're all in it together that to me is like a you know a sort of consistent state of of happiness so i know that's not the usual place where people find happiness but but i do and i think the pot squad does too susan so you introduced the concept of bittersweet using the story of a man who in the middle of a war zone held vigil every day playing his cello can you tell us the story about the cellist and why it's important to have this conversation about the power of bittersweetness now yeah at this moment in history I can.

Okay.

So in 1992, when there was

the war and the siege of the city of Sarajevo, there were bombings all the time, and

there was one bombing in particular that happened right next to the apartment of the lead cellist of the Sarajevo orchestra.

And you have to understand, this was a time kind of like what we're going through now with Ukraine.

In Sarajevo, people couldn't leave their houses or they had to in order to search for bread, but they would spend hours kind of like creeping down the streets, hoping not to be caught by a bomb or by a snipe.

by the snipers who were positioned trying to take them out, you know, just as they tried to get food for their families.

So, in the middle of all this, there's a bomb, and the lead cellist of the orchestra is right nearby.

And first, he goes and he helps the people who have been wounded.

And then, a few hours later, he comes back and he sits in the middle of the rubble, like kind of like out in the open in the city in which nobody is sitting, just hanging out in the open.

But he does, and he sits there with his cello and he plays the Albinonian G minor.

It's just, it's the most incredibly haunting and exquisite music you can imagine.

And he plays this music for anybody who wants to listen.

And he comes back and he plays it every day for 22 days, which is the number of people who were killed by that particular bomb.

And

it becomes an instantly iconic moment.

People make films about it.

They write novels about it.

The fact of this man who later says, you know, you ask me if I'm crazy for sitting outside in an open square playing music in the middle of a war zone.

And I say to you, they're the crazy ones for bombing Sarajevo.

You can't listen to this music without being incredibly stirred.

But there's also the question of, like, okay,

why is the albinone, which, as I say, is this deeply haunting minor key music, why is that what he chose to play at that moment?

Like, he could have played something cheerful to rouse people's spirits.

He could could have played something more neutral.

But he plays the albinone, which is

this aching music.

And I think the reason is that when we hear that kind of minor key music, that sad music,

there's something about it that is expressing our kind of longing for the heavens,

our recognition that there's a world that we wish we could live in and we don't live in it right now, but we're all deeply united in the fervor of our wish to live in a more perfect and more beautiful world.

You know, that feeling you get when you see something really beautiful and it makes you cry?

So that's why we're crying.

It's because that beauty is expressing the world that we feel like we're banished from, but want desperately to get back to.

And we can talk about how that's actually a really empowering.

sensation.

And that's why when we see the pictures right now in the Ukraine of all of the strollers that the mothers from Poland left at the train station so that the women bringing their babies out of Ukraine would come off and see those strollers.

If you want to know what bittersweet feels like, think about that picture.

It's this idea that sometimes for some reason, it's when things are the most painful that when humanity shows up,

it cracks your heart open, like takes your breath.

It's a depth of beauty that we don't get when everything feels okay.

For me, it's like those moments we're

in the busyness of living all the time.

We're functioning, we're functioning all the time.

So we have to kind of suspend our awe and fear and love about everything because we're just functioning.

But then it's in these moments like that, when we see that, that we kind of unsuspend and it's like pulling back the curtain.

And then

it's like

honest.

It's honest for that one moment.

We are this horrible.

We are this good.

We are this greedy.

We are this generous.

We are this brave.

We are this precarious.

And it's like we can all agree on that for a minute.

And then we go back to life.

Because that's the truth.

It's not the rest is the truth.

That's the truest truth.

That's why people long for the, in untamed, I call it the truer, more beautiful world.

Let's talk about the longing for that.

Cause what the hell is that?

We talk about it as the seen world versus the unseen world that we have this idea that I think is the closest I can come to understanding what faith is, that there's a I agree.

Right.

That's faith.

It's not a list of rules that we keep and keep people in and out.

That's not what it is to me.

It's this hunch that it was all supposed to be more beautiful than this.

And then faith in action

is not just having the hunch, but stretching for it.

Gosh, I mean, I really don't think I've ever met anyone in the seven years that I've been on this this quest that I've been on who has expressed it exactly the way I think about it and the way that you just did.

That was amazing.

I come at this having been a lifelong, like incredibly agnostic person, sort of leaning towards the atheist dimension.

And yet also at the same time, like always having this deep, inexplicable response to.

minor key music that would make me feel a sense of uplift and connection.

And what I've come to realize is that,

as you just said, it's like the most fundamental aspect of being human is having this sense of longing for a different world.

Whether you think of it in secular terms or spiritual terms, I have come to believe is completely beside the point.

Not everybody takes it this way, but I think it's true.

Like, you look at Darthy somewhere over the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz.

What is she saying?

She's saying there's like another world over the rainbow, and that's where I want to be.

You know, C.S.

Lewis talked about the inconsolable longing for we know not what.

Rumi in the 12th century, like Jalala Rumi, the great Sufi poet, talked about how the longing for God is the return message.

He has this one poem of

a man who is praying to Allah and

And then he stops praying because a cynic comes by as he's praying and says, you know, what are you doing that for?

Have you ever gotten an answer back?

And he's like, no, I mean, I guess I never have gotten an answer.

So maybe this whole thing, maybe there's no point to it.

And then he falls asleep and he has a dream that Khidr, who is the guide of souls, comes to him and says, why did you stop praying?

And he says to him, this longing, like this longing that you feel 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 I think that's the real answer.

You know, whether we're, whether we consider ourselves spiritual or atheists or believers or whatever, I think that we have been focusing too much on those distinctions when the real thing, that's the fundamental thing that unites us all.

is this longing that some of us see manifested through religion and some of us see it manifested through music and some of us see it through art or through those strollers that are lined up at the station and really that's the core essence and the longing is the distance between the visible world and the unseen world what i

just am so get so sad about about christianity

which is the tradition that i have related to and practiced is that it's often there is a longing for the truer beautiful world which in christians would call heaven right but then it's seen more as a escape plan.

We just wait.

We just wait to get to that one.

Let's not worry about this shitty world

because there's a true and more beautiful one.

So the longing is there, but the plan is to wait it out.

It's like faith is the vision,

the longing for the truer, more beautiful world.

But then the bringing on earth as it is in heaven,

what that means is bringing to earth the vision.

You work to get from the way it is now to to get to the way it should be and that is

that's faith with works and if you don't have that stretch it's just dead it's just a an evacuation plan yeah i can't believe that you just were used the word stretch because i mean the word longing we think of it as being a passive state, like, you know, we in a state of longing, right?

But I mean, the word longing actually comes from Germanic and Anglo words that literally mean to stretch, you know, to reach for that other place.

If I had to transform the takeaway of this whole quest that I've been on of seven years of thinking about these questions, it's that what we need to do is try to transform pain into beauty, like, period.

And that's a really big thing because we all go through pains and some people

very unfairly in a way that we will never be able to understand.

Some people go through pains beyond measure.

And what we see is that some people take those pains and, for a thousand reasons,

might not be able to integrate them.

And then they take out those pains on other people, right?

And the cycle continues.

And then there is this other pathway that is transforming those pains into something different.

And I feel like that's what you're talking about.

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I see my daughter right now and she, Tish, she's, how the hell old is she?

She's 16.

She is a very bittersweet soul.

So when she was really little, she came into my bedroom, Susan, and she said, mom, I'm so scared.

I'm lonely.

I'm alone.

And I said, And she was like six or something.

And I said, well, honey, I'm right here.

And she pointed to her skin, herself.

She goes, no, I'm alone in here.

I'm all alone in here.

Our buzzword for her bittersweetness was tender.

So she'd say to me, mommy, I'm feeling tender.

And that meant to me, nothing made me sad.

There's nothing to fix.

I'm just feeling that exposed awe of reality, right?

That everyone else seems to ignore.

But the difference between the two of us is that I was her at 10 and I didn't know what you talk in bittersweet about when we feel this melancholy and we don't know how to transform it into beauty.

It can eat us alive, right?

Especially in a culture that worships happiness because we think there's something wrong with us.

Yeah.

So I was an addict.

I became an act when I was 10 and Tish plays music.

Wow.

And it's amazing.

And she plays sad music.

It has an aching in it.

Like I can't even, sometimes I ask Abby to turn it off.

It's too truthful.

It's too true.

It's based in truth.

Yeah.

And i think that both of you your art is based in truth and i would say probably a lot of people sometimes struggle to even read some of the things that you write i'm not going to have a lot to in in put into

my happy love yeah i'm i'm not melancholy by nature my husband's like you abby susan do we need those people let's talk about that because yeah we should i've told abby you know i have a whole chapter in untamed where i would say she's pearl she's like this like sparkly light color And I'm midnight blue.

And so I thought if we got married, we could just smush together and both become sky blue.

But then I realized that's lesbian codependency.

So I have to be midnight blue for the rest of my life.

And she has to be her pearl.

What do you see as the difference between you and your husband?

Like, how do you experience life differently?

And how does it work to be a bittersweet type married to a, what would you call them?

What are they called?

Shiny, happy people?

I would call that, well, a sanguine type is what I would say.

Aristotle was talking about this 2,000 years ago.

And he talked about melancholic types and sanguine types.

And I think that we deeply meet each other.

And I think we know that.

Like, you know, I doubt that that shining moment that you describe in your book of when the two of you met.

I doubt that you were thinking, well, I'm bittersweet and

she's sanguine or like any version of it.

But I think deep down, you both knew it, right?

Yeah.

I noticed it this weekend.

I told Abby,

I am, you know, a lot of people listening discovered Susan from the book Quiet, which was about introverts, which really helped me understand myself deeply.

Same.

Well, it made me understand other people, right?

Right.

But I told Abby she was away for several

days this past week, and I was alone with people without her.

And I realized that I have a harder time being myself when Abby's not around because I can't be quiet.

People expect me to talk back to them.

Like if I don't talk, nobody else, they expect me to say stuff when there's only two people in the room.

But usually when Abby's there, I can just not talk.

The buffer.

I actually have a question in terms of the difference between your husband and you.

Do you think that his happiness is full of shit?

Okay.

Wow, this is complicated.

I don't think it's full of shit.

And I know that I need it.

I do feel like sometimes he's getting it wrong.

Yeah.

And I know that sometimes he thinks I'm getting it wrong.

I never think it's full of shit because I know that he deeply sees the world that way.

I guess I feel like sometimes he's just so conditioned to seeing everything through a lens of it's all going to be okay.

Does he say that?

It's always going going to be okay.

Now, I mean, we just have a different take on what's happening.

And sometimes he's right and sometimes I'm right.

Yeah.

Or you're both right.

I want to emphasize what you said about focusing on the wrong thing in terms of religion and faith traditions, because I have always thought,

okay,

I don't give a shit what you tell me your religion is.

You tell me your vision of the truer, more beautiful world.

You tell me what it looks like for you.

Like, is it less war?

Is it equality?

Is it justice?

Is it peace?

If my longing matches yours, let's work together.

Because there are plenty of people who are in my religion who have a completely different version of what the truer, more beautiful world looks like.

So I have less in common with them

than I do with people from different religions who share my longing and who want to work in that stretch.

Longing is a religion.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So, yes.

So I think longing is the religion, is what I would say.

It's cool.

It's the religion and it leads to so many beautiful things.

It's compassion and it leads to us not just being complacent with the life we have.

We're going and we're trying to make it better.

It's theoretically improving the condition.

But then when we get to romantic love,

intersected with this kind of fantasy that we have in the world of our missing half, like our soulmate who is going to

know us fully and complete us fully.

Then we have our natural baseline of longing with that myth.

And

that prevents us

from actually appreciating the partners we have

because we have this

longing for

this myth that is out there.

And we're forever comparing our actual people

with,

as you say, strangers, especially in libraries and trains.

So good.

It's like the condition in these other areas, it seems to work.

But in romantic love, it's like this condition of our heart being homesick for a home that never even existed.

Right.

So is that a negative of longing?

Because when we were talking about this book endlessly, Susan,

it's like the longing life.

that I live.

It's like, it's good in lots of ways.

It makes you try to make the world better.

It makes you want better and see more beautiful.

If you're always wanting better, does that not good for your romantic relationships?

Because isn't there a level of acceptance like that makes it so that my sister says, Is there not four people in every relationship?

There's you, there's me, and then there's my ideal partner and your ideal partner.

Yeah,

these are such amazing questions.

This is why I think that we have to understand what our longing is,

especially when it hits us in the realm of love.

The Sufi teacher, Llewellyn Von Lee, he talks about how

the Sufis used to

have these songs that they would sing.

They would use their carnal longings as a metaphor for the longing for God.

So, you know, they would say, like, I'm thinking about the ruby lips and so on, but they didn't actually mean the ruby lips of

an actual woman.

They meant God.

And then what happened, according to Llewellyn Bon Lee, is that

during the time of the Crusades,

there was another tradition that came in and heard

this kind of poetry and converted it into the songs of the Troubadours.

And like they didn't really understand that all of this was just a metaphor for God.

And instead, they took it kind of literally as I'm now serenading, you know, a maiden underneath a moonlit window kind of thing.

And I I think that that's what happens to all of us in our relationships when we are longing for that perfect partner and when our partner is disappointing us in some profound way, we don't even understand what's happening.

We don't realize that

the romantic longings we have are just one aspect of this greater, deeper longing.

And I think once we understand it, that's actually when we're freed up to see our partners as they really are and see ourselves as we really are, as these deeply deeply flawed beings and that that's okay because we're the ones in the here and now like we're we're here in in the banished state outside of the garden of eden so we're going to love each other as best we can outside that garden um at the same time that we both long to be there so i i think understanding this is like the best marriage advice anybody could ever have because

it's it's saying that that that vision that you have of this perfect shining partner who will always understand everything about you

it's not that that's not real it's that it's something else and you're mistaking it you're understanding it

it's god it reminds me of what estaire perel says about in a different way she talks about how the crossover of what we used to want and and expect from the divine we now in our secular culture have brought to our romantic partners so we want

We have this longing.

We think it's like, ooh, it's you.

You're the thing that doesn't measure up.

Right.

And what we're really saying is, you're not the Garden of Eden.

How could you not be the Garden of Eden?

I like that.

How is that fair?

And it's beautiful because I think sometimes in response to

deep disappointments in, I thought it would be more beautiful than this with our partner, the answer is, oh, you have unrealistic expectations.

This vision you have,

that can't possibly be met.

But what I hear you saying is, no, there's, I'm not telling you to diminish that vision.

That vision should be as big and beautiful and divine as you can possibly imagine.

I'm just telling you that that vision,

this will not meet.

I love that because it's not saying just bring it down a notch and be happy with what you have.

It's saying

keep imagining and building.

that beautiful thing and going toward it, but go toward it with this deeply flawed person, just like you are deeply flawed.

Exactly, exactly.

And to really like, you know, very likely in most relationships, especially at the beginning of the relationship, but then you have these moments throughout it, you know, you have these moments where you feel like, okay, now we're touching the heavens.

And those moments are some of the best things that are ever going to happen to you.

So, you know, to treasure those moments, those are sacred moments.

that it's part of why we're alive is to have those moments

at the same time that we understand that they are just moments.

The nature of life on earth is that we're not living in those moments all the time.

I would like to give a shout out to addicts here.

I was just going to say, oh, this is the basis of my addiction right here.

I just want to hear your reflection on this because I feel, I don't know how to say this, but

I

feel like a lot of addicts

are people

who have

the deep longing.

We are trying to get with the booze, with the food, with the drugs, with the whatever, to this truer, more beautiful state of being.

It's not that we're wimps, it's that we actually have this deeply spiritual wish for a higher plane.

Right?

Now, we went about it the wrong way and we accidentally ruined our lives and everyone else's, but that was the stretch for us.

Yep.

I always thought that I was taking it to something deeper beyond.

There was some piece of me that I wasn't, it was almost like there was that, what I thought was there was like this part of me that could only be explored via alcohol, drugs, whatever.

Like, and I thought that that was a God part, not like in me.

It's so interesting.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Yes.

And I feel like that's why, whenever people are like, well, addicts always become artists or artists are always addicts or all of them.

That is the through line of both of those.

that's just like the yearning and then people meet it through the booze and they meet it through the art but it's not that addicts become artists it's that longers yeah bittersweet types oh my god exactly

use the the thing the alcohol and then often find art do you see that with addicts oh my gosh i see exactly every single beat of what you're saying rings so deep and true i think that's exactly it the best framework that I have encountered in trying to think through what to do with that issue for addicts or creatives or anybody who feels this longing, you know, from the book I'm kind of obsessed with, Leonard Cohn,

the musician.

And

his work, in turn, a lot of it is derived from the Kabbalah, which is the Jewish mystical tradition.

There's this one idea that I found incredibly helpful.

The metaphor of the Kabbalah is that all of divinity was once this one vessel, and then the vessel broke apart.

And now the world that we live in is the world where these shards of divinity are kind of like scattered all around us amidst all the tragedy and the ugliness and the imperfections.

There are these shards of divinity.

And so

the task really for all of us is simply to pick up those shards wherever we can find them.

And I love this because it's not saying to us that we're we're ever going to get to that world that I think is fueling addiction or fueling unfulfilled creatives.

The goal is not to actually reach the thing you're longing for.

The goal is simply to take in this reality and reach for it where you can.

It's a much more modest vision, but I think it's very liberating.

I love that.

And it's not like you have to put it all back.

I feel like I'm always trying to make sense of everything in a whole.

Like, if I made that metaphor, I would be like, okay, my job is to find all the shards, put them all back together, see the whole thing, make it work.

Like, no, but just the idea of picking up little beautiful pieces and saying to the world, this is a beautiful thing.

Yeah.

And it doesn't have to be all put back together.

It's not only that it doesn't have to be, I think it's actually dangerous to think that it can all be put back together because, I mean, in the way that we know, it's dangerous with addiction.

Like, if you think it can be put back together, whether it's through addiction or through politics or through whatever it is, you end up sacrificing too much

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So, if you're a bittersweet person,

number one, you understand what we're talking about when you're talking about the longing.

You get that.

In Untamed, even the cheetah metaphor was that.

Even a cheetah born in captivity

knows somehow that it was supposed to be more beautiful than this.

If you understood that metaphor in the book, you might be bittersweet.

Okay.

A second

idea that is is in the book is this idea of if you're a bittersweet type, you see beauty and pain and pain and beauty.

You use C.S.

Lewis, the stabs of joy.

Yeah.

It's like that feeling.

What I think about it is when I was little and I would, something beautiful would happen to me.

Like I would smell my mom's lotion or something when she leaned over to kiss me.

And it was so wonderful and horrible.

Like right away, I would feel this horror of, of loss, of like, whatever I love, I'm going to lose.

Like, when I look at my kids and they're in a moment of beauty, like say they're on the beach and like they're running free, I look at them and what I feel is not pure joy.

I wish it were, but it's not.

It's joy matched with this

dread, or

it's a stab.

It's a stab of joy.

Can you talk about that, Susan?

Yeah, absolutely.

It's like you see the child, you know, splashing in the rain pudding and tears come into your eyes.

And we think, oh, well, the tears are in our eyes just because it's so beautiful and it moved us.

But

this moment of the child's joy moved us.

But that's not really all that it is.

It's also,

we know, whether we know it consciously or not, we know that that child is going to grow up.

We know that we may or may not be there to see it, but we won't be there to see something in that child's life when they're grown up.

The child won't be a child forever.

They won't be alive forever.

We know all of that when we're seeing these moments of beauty.

And so we're like holding these two truths at the same time of this amazing, precious child and the fact of impermanence.

And

that's what makes us cry.

But I do have to say, like to people who are listening to this, being like, oh my God, does this mean, you know, I just have to like cry forever or something.

I have found through being really immersed in this topic, There's something about immersing in this that

it's not that the longing goes away, but it kind of resolves in a certain way.

You understand so much what impermanence is and how deeply it's part of us that I feel less tormented by it and more just like deeply appreciative of it.

We talk a lot about what fear brings us.

It actually brings us protection, what anger brings us.

It brings us boundaries, what we will accept and won't.

But we don't talk a lot about what sadness brings us.

Sadness is an important in a toxically positive culture.

Oh, yeah, like hugely.

Sadness is just shunned, but we need to reclaim the power of sadness.

Because what I love about your book is it's not, I'm not talking about wimpy sadness.

Like love is not wimpy.

I'm talking about a sadness that is a deep paying attention, that is a willingness to feel

the pain of the world that then leads you to be deeply involved in it in a way that can be healing for all.

I think of this kind of sadness as very deeply strong.

So

tell us about

what sadness, what this bittersweetness brings to the world, like all of the power in it.

There is a long intellectual tradition of the concept of a wounded healer.

And this is the idea that people who have withstood any kind of wound, which is almost all of us, you can take that wound and

take it out on someone else, or you can use it in a healing kind of way.

This has been part of our intellectual tradition for thousands of years, but I'll give you just one concrete example.

Maya Angelou, who of course wrote, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, if you know that story that she tells in that book,

she from the time of earliest childhood had withstood more wounds than anybody should in an entire lifetime, including being raped when when she was, I think it was eight years old, and then telling people about that rape and seeing the man who had raped her be killed by people who are outraged about it.

And so she started to feel that her own voice was so dangerous, it could get a man killed.

And so she should stop talking.

And she actually stopped talking.

for five whole years.

She literally did not talk to anyone but her brother for five years.

And then

she meets this woman, Bertha Flowers, who takes the young Maya under her wing and starts introducing her.

And during all this time that she hadn't been talking, she'd been reading, reading, reading.

So Bertha Flowers introduces her to A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens

and reads it to her in kind of like a voice of song.

And she's completely mesmerized by it.

And it opens her up.

And she starts taking her wounds at that moment and turning them into healing.

So she starts writing herself.

And we all know memoirs and plays and poetry and so on.

That's like one shining example of the way in which you can take the pains that you have suffered to do something good for somebody else.

But you don't have to be a genius the way she was to do that.

You can do it in the simplest of ways.

Exactly, like an everyday thing.

Because I love the Keltner quote when he said, sadness is beautiful and sadness is wise.

Sadness is a meditation on compassion.

And the sadness is a meditation on compassion.

For me, it's like when

somebody dies and you go pay your respects and you're solemnly in there, you're witnessing, you're in communion with the family.

And that's what I feel like

sadness as a baseline every day is.

It's like paying your respects, being in communion with a world that is full of astonishing grief all the time.

Compassion means to suffer together.

So it feels like the only choices are to suffer together or to suffer alone, right?

So, so I feel like that is just, that's why sadness is beautiful.

That's why sadness is wise, because it's the way we suffer together instead of suffering alone.

Yes.

And you don't have to be a poet to do that.

And actually, it bothers me when we only talk about bittersweet types as artists, because actually what I think,

I was a teacher.

And when I was a third grade teacher and a preschool teacher, what I was doing was trying to bring my unseen order.

to the seen world.

I was trying to create a truer, more beautiful world in my classroom where people were good to each other and everybody got to bring their full selves to the table and things were fair.

And

nurses, doctors, frontline workers, teachers, like all of these people are usually bittersweet types that have a longing for a truer, more beautiful world and then make it through their service.

So artists are one way, but everybody who serves.

Exactly.

I want to come back to the strollers in Ukraine, the strollers that people have left out

for refugees.

What is it about that image, the image of the strollers that are left for the babies?

Why is that the image that has seized us so?

Because I'm sure it's the case that there have been all kinds of gestures of

goodwill and generosity, but this is the one that took hold in our hearts and in the media.

And there's really a reason for that.

And the reason, and you were talking, Amanda, about the work of Daker Keltner, who's a psychologist whose life story I told in the book and also his work.

And he talks about how what he calls the compassionate instinct, that it really comes fundamentally, it comes from

our wiring as mammals, as humans, to respond to the cries of our infants.

And because we're primed that way, because the whole species is designed to be able to take care of defenseless infants who are crying all the time, because of that, it kind of radiates outward from there so that we respond in a very deep and visceral and physical way

to

to the cries or to the grief of anybody

and obviously we don't always get it right because our species is sometimes awful but that's kind of our best hope and that's the reason that the strollers are what move us because we know it's those strollers that are the the the the source code of our ability to get beyond this war state that we're in I do think that the great challenge of our next century is how to make this compassionate instinct that we have for babies, how do we widen it?

I really do believe that opening up channels where it is normal to talk about these kinds of sorrows and longings that everyone has, that is one of the best bridges we have across differences, however we perceive those differences.

That's the one that gets us in the gut.

Just to talk for a second about Ducker Keltner's work.

Like he found that

we all have the vagus nerve, and that's the biggest bundle of nerve.

It's like a nerve collection in our bodies.

It's the biggest one.

And it's involved with everything as fundamental as breathing and sex drive and digestion.

So it's like really what keeps us alive.

And it's also our vagus nerve that responds when we see another being in distress.

And I think that's amazing if you think about it.

Like it's telling us that our ability to respond empathically and desiring action for somebody else is distress.

That's as fundamental as our need to breathe.

That's how big it is.

So I believe if we could figure out a way to really open things up so that

we can tell these stories about ourselves across racial groups and so on, to really tell these stories without any kind of stigma attached to it.

That to me was the most impactful

part of reading because because I

think in this culture where we're taught if we are sad, that means we just can't take it.

We just can't cut it.

We need to just like fuck up.

To understand that sadness physically

inside the body, which triggers compassion, that that is written into the code of us

as much as breathing

in order to be humans.

So that vagus nerve, the things it controls, the breathing, the digestion, the sex, the things that you need to be alive and to continue the species.

And the other thing is it makes you care,

right?

You see something sad, it makes you care.

So, so caring

is as important to being a human being as breathing.

But we have been taught sad, bad.

So we try not to respond to that.

But I think if we understand ourselves, that is a necessary function of our humanity and it's an evolutionary requirement.

Like we need it to continue on,

then I think

we not only have more compassion to the world, but to ourselves.

Because we're saying, oh, no, I'm just doing a very human thing that I am hardwired to do.

And in fact, I should be responding.

When I feel that nudge, I should be doing it.

And Together Rising, we always say that we're not about givers and receivers, that there isn't like one group in need, that we're all deeply in need.

And that Vegas nerve research was like, yes, we are all deeply in need.

We are either deeply in need of responding to suffering in the world, or we're deeply in need of being relieved of suffering in our lives.

And often we're both in the same month, but there is a common need as humans

to care, to deal with suffering, to care.

Yeah.

And I think it's revolutionary and it's resistance.

It's, it's,

it's not an accident that in our very

unjust and very violent world, caring has become something soft that you shouldn't do, that you should just numb yourself.

Like, that's because that's how status quo continues.

If nobody cares and nobody feels and nobody actually pays attention, then the seven people who are in power get to keep all the money and all the power because it's an excellent way to keep status quo is to keep caring as something loserish and soft.

And that's why I think this bittersweetness and way of life and caring is a badass

warrior way of life.

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Susan, we have a thing that we do on the pod called the next straight thing, and it's just something that people can do to take away from what we're talking about that day.

And we, sister and I have been talking a lot about your book and about burnout and this idea that there's a cycle that we have to go through.

We feel stress and then we have to release the stress.

And if we don't complete the cycle, we have problems.

And we've started thinking about that in terms of your book: like, what is the bittersweet cycle?

Like, we're used to caring, just like we're used to feeling stress, but we don't do the relief thing,

we don't complete the cycle.

So, what if with our next right thing, we want to talk about completing the sadness cycle and the things that we can do that will bring us relief and strength instead of just storing it all up.

And I know that one of the things you say is transforming

our love, our bittersweetness, our sadness into music, into healing, into art.

And my favorite thing that you talk about, that you do actually,

is that you promise us that we actually don't have to create the art.

Yeah.

We can consume the art and that can save the cycle.

Can you tell us about how you've done this?

Because I think this is something like world shifting that people can just do in their freaking Instagram feeds.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay.

So, first of all, we've been focused so much on sorrow and suffering and so on.

And we've done that because we're living in a culture that's like, yay, joy, no good sorrow.

But the truth of bittersweetness is that joy is equally important.

Joy is equally present with sorrow.

They're an inseparable pair, let's say.

So we do need to talk about joy too.

And Glenn, and to the...

idea that you were getting to.

Okay, so when the pandemic first started,

and I had a heck of a time in the pandemic, my father and my brother both passed away from COVID, so it was like very, very real for me.

And I was going through this period of, you know, waking up in the morning and doom scrolling the way people do.

And I knew I had to get out of this loop.

I started deciding to follow art accounts on Twitter.

And at first, just a few.

And then I started asking around which ones should I follow?

And I got all these recommendations.

And pretty soon my whole feed was full of art.

And then I didn't really expect this, but then I just naturally from there developed this practice where now almost every morning I wake up and the first thing I do before starting my real work is

I pick a favorite piece of art to share on social.

And I do that along with an idea or a quote or whatever of the day.

And it's become a kind of, you know, sacred daily practice that I love, love, love doing.

And it's attracted a lot of like-minded people to also sort of be together in this journey.

And it's all a long way of saying that I think that the simple act of thinking, what is my daily shot of beauty going to be

is incredibly transformative, you know, and just to be thinking actively, how can I bring more beauty into my life?

How can I cultivate it?

And as Glennon said, you know, we are, we are taught that

to engage with beauty, you have to be like a super talented artist of some kind with tons of people buying your paintings or something.

And that's completely deluded.

That has nothing to do with it.

All you really need to be doing is engaging with beauty as you see it.

So it's enough to just look at the art and love it, or go look at the waterfall and love that, you know, whatever it is that you love.

And that's not just me saying it.

There are also studies that find that the simple act of consuming art is transformative for people.

Yes, that's so beautiful.

We do it every day with music.

If I'm in my kitchen,

I'm in the scene world.

Boo.

Then I turn on the right music and I'm immediately in the true more beautiful world.

Yeah.

If I light some incense, forget about it.

Gone.

So there's like these little things that you can do.

And then

the creating or consuming the beauty.

And then there's the service in a world that will tell you that you should not be heartbroken.

There is the other way, which is like, no, no, no, you run as fast as you can towards what breaks your heart because that is where you'll find your people and your purpose.

Yeah, that's

a clue for you.

And there too, it's great if you go and start a foundation or do some gigantic thing.

That's wonderful.

But you don't have to think of it like that.

There's a Jewish saying of if you've saved one life, you've saved the whole world.

I think there's a really deep truth in there.

So if it feels too overwhelming to you to do some grand act, it doesn't have to be that.

It could be like, what do you feel like is the wound that has most affected you?

And what could you do for one being in this world that would alleviate their pain?

And that I think is the greatest meaning in life.

Like if you've alleviated the pain of one being, you've probably done pretty well.

Yeah.

It's the idea of what you wish you could do for the world, do for one person.

Yeah, exactly.

Susan, I know you wanted to talk about joy, joy, the happiness of melancholy was your original working title.

What would you say about joy?

And when you

experience joy

as the inextricable flip side of

melancholy, what does it look like?

What does it feel like?

What does it bring you?

I don't know if this sounds like a cliche or not, but it's beauty and it's love.

And that's where I go immediately.

And I guess we talked about beauty already,

but love is like the clear one.

So

the closest relationships in my life are incredibly dear to me.

And so that's like the,

I'd say that's the telescope looking

in a really close way.

But when you expand it out, I feel like the whole reason that I became a writer in the first place is because I was completely mesmerized as a reader, as a kid, by the kind of incredibly deep communion that could happen between a writer who might not even be alive anymore and then the reader who's reading it like a thousand years later, let's say.

That communion to me is just the most incredible thing.

So I kind of live for those moments of communion.

I look for them in a thousand different ways.

That's what I feel like the goal is.

And as I say, I think that the great challenge for all of us for the next century is figuring out how to feel that deep a sense of communion for everybody.

And I don't think it comes naturally to us humans, but that's where we have to get to.

I love that joy as communion because then the joy is in the communion.

You may be communing over something sorrowful, or you may be communicating over something celebratory, but the joy is just in the communion.

I'm so glad you're making that distinction because yes, the whole point of it is the communion.

And all I'm really trying to say is it so happens there's this weird quirk that shared sorrow is a way of getting us to communion that our culture has completely ignored.

So it's like we have this superpower that helps us get to communion that we're just not even using because our culture is so biased against it.

It's not the only way to get there though, but getting there is the ultimate point.

And yeah, and so for the minor key music lovers, that's really what you're feeling when you feel that.

weird ecstasy at the sound of bittersweet minor key music.

What you're really feeling is communion with the artist who created it and with that which the music is expressing, that all human beings experience.

It's communion underneath.

So beautiful.

Susan, thank you for this time together.

Thank you for your work, which has definitely been

just so life-affirming.

You made me a better leader.

Oh, yeah.

Abby read your book, Quiet, to help herself understand the women on her soccer team years ago.

Wow.

Yeah, who are introverted and a little bit less loud than me.

Thank you, everybody, for the next right thing.

Pick up Bittersweet.

You will not regret it.

Follow more artists, musicians, and poets, and nurses, and teachers, and frontline workers, and all of those kinds of Bittersweet warriors in the world.

And just find somebody to be kind to today.

Because that makes that

stretch.

That's right.

That's the stretch between the seen world and

yeah, and the unseen world.

I just want to thank you all so much.

I'm just such deep and profound fans of all of you.

And this, just getting to talk to you right now has been such an incredible gift.

Thank you, Susan.

And to the rest of you, we can do hard things, like remembering that being human is not about feeling happy all the time.

It's about feeling everything.

We'll see you next week.

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