We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Susan Cain Says Sadness is a Superpower

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

1. How to know if you are a “Bittersweet” type. 2. On “stabs of joy”—and why our joy is often accompanied by dread. 3. How to complete the cycle of sadness, in order to live with more joy. 4. Susan and Sister’s best relationship advice: That our longing for the perfect partner is not really about our partner. 5. Why Glennon thinks those who feel the ache are often those who fall into addiction. About Susan: Susan Cain is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Journal, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking, which has been translated into 40 languages, spent seven years on the New York Times best seller list, and was named the #1 best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Cain one of its Most Creative People in Business. Her new masterpiece, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, was published by Crown on April 5, 2022. LinkedIn named Susan the 6th Top Influencer in the world. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant and Dan Pink to curate the Next Big Idea Book Club. They donate all their proceeds to children’s literacy programs. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her record-smashing TED talk has been viewed over 40 million times, and was named by Bill Gates one of his all-time favorite talks. Cain has also spoken at Google, PIXAR, the U.S. Treasury, P&G, Harvard, and West Point. She received Harvard Law School’s Celebration Award for Thought Leadership, the Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award for Communication and Leadership, and was named one of the world’s top 50 Leadership and Management Experts by Inc. Magazine. She is an honors graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School. Visit Susan at susancain.net.  TW: @susancain IG: @susancainauthor To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist in the office parking lot, or being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift, whether you're running on your Peloton tread at your mom's house while she watches the baby, or counting your breaths on the subway. Peloton is for all of us, wherever we are whenever we need it, download the free Peloton app today. Peloton app available through free tier, or pay subscription starting at 12.99 per month. Okay, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. I have been waiting for this day. This is my day to shine. This is the day. I don't know if it's your day to shine. Right, right. We do have a very very special guest who I actually believe is a

beautiful genius. Yeah, 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. 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

Brutal life alongside all of these stunningly beautiful human beings on this harrowing Brutal planet. Yeah, can you please tell people what? Brutal means because you're kind of just so Brutal 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

Yeah, so it's just life is beautiful all at once, and you just have to take it all. And if there is no word, Glen and Will create one. Right, I like to make words. The deal is that I've always been sad, and I have always felt like happy people were just sort of deluded and irresponsible and woefully uninformed.

So we're the 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 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, press. But fine, depressed. In our culture though, it's not happiness, but sadness that 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, 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 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 Cain's own words from her new Earth-shattering book called bitter sweet

Susan Cain says the sadness is in fact a quiet force a way of being a Story 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 Kay and I have invited you here to connect our bittersweet pods waters to the storied tradition of bittersweetness to tell them they're 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 Cain is the author of the best sellers 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. Seven years, she is an honors graduate of Princeton. Who is it? You know, and Harvard last 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 Cain, thank you for leaving my people. Well, thank you so, so much for having me. I'm just huge as fans of all of you. And I have been so looking forward to this for so long because Glenin, 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. 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 Mill and Colley, 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 the same experience 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. The two me is like a sort of consistent state of happiness. So I know that's not the usual place where people find happiness, but I do.

And I think the Pugswad 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 at this moment in history? I can. Okay, so in 1992 when there was the war and the the the siege of the city of Sarajevo, there were bombings all the time, and there was one.

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 creeping down the the streets hoping not to be caught by a bomb

or by the snipers who were positioned trying to take them out, you know, just as they try 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 Albino knee and 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 are 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 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 Albany, 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 have played something cheerful to rouse people's spirits.

He could have played something more neutral. But he plays the Albany, which is this aching music. And I think the reason is that when we hear that kind of minor key music, 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. 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 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 better sweet 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 were, 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 an untamed, I call it the the true or more beautiful

world. Let's talk about the longing for that. Because what the hell is that? We talk about it as the scene 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 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 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 Comet 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 mind or key music that would make me feel the 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 Dorothy somewhere over the rainbow and 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, CS Lewis talked about the inconsolable longing for we know not what. Um, Rumi in the 12th century, like Jalala Dumi, the great Sufi poet, talked about how the longing for God is the return message. He has this one poem of, um, of a man who is praying to Allah. And then he stops praying because a synch comes by as he's praying and says, 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 Hitter 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, 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 true beautiful world, which in Christians would call heaven. But then it's seen more as an 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 true and more beautiful world. But then 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 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 an evacuation plan. Yeah, I can't believe that you just were, use the word stretch because, I mean, the word longing, we think of it as being a passive state, like, you know, when it be 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 might not be able to integrate them and and then they take out those pains and other people, 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. I'm Jonathan M. Hevar. I'm a podcast producer and someone who likes fancy things.

But I grew up working class. My parents were immigrants with factory jobs. And because of that, I think about class a lot. And I want to talk about it. That's what we're doing on my new podcast, Classy. And what did you all eat? You know, trailer food. I was like, girl, we're not doing that anymore. You'll hear from people who told me awkward embarrassing and strangely intimate things about what class means to them. She said, you know, for the house cleaner,

I hide the tag on the $6 bread. And I just thought, don't you think she knows that you're wealthy? You're hiding the tags from yourself. Classy. A new podcast from Pineapple Street Studios. Available now. Wherever you get your podcasts. I see my daughter right now and she tests. She's how the hell old. She's 16.

She is a very set bittersweet soul. So when she was really little, she 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. Oh, I'm all alone in here Our buzzword for her bitter sweetness 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 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 but are sweet 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 actor and 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 ask Abby to turn it off. It's true. It's 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 you you write. I'm not gonna have a lot to in and 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 to end here. I would say she's pearl. She's like on 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 a 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 What do you see as a 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 it about a sanguine type, is what I would say Aristotle was talking about this 2000 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 better sweet and she sanguine or like any version of it, but I think deep down you both knew it, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I noticed it this weekend. I 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, made me understand other people. Right, right. But I told Abby she was away for several 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. 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 so that too? I'm always going to be okay.

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 true or more beautiful world. 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 true and more beautiful world looks like.

So I've 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, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, 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. So good. So good. So good. So good. So good. So good.

So good. So good. So good. So good. So good. So good. 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, Endless Leesiesin, 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's not good for your romantic relationships? Because it's in their 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. 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 to the well-invon Lee, he talks about how the Sufi's 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 the well and banli 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 mated underneath a moonlit window kind of thing. And 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's okay because we're the ones in the here and now. Like we're here 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 at the same time that we both long to be there. So I think understanding this is like the best marriage advice anybody could ever have. Yes. 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. It's got. It's got. It reminds you of what Esther Pearl says about in a different way. She talks about how the crossover of what we used to want 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, oh, 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? And it's beautiful because I think sometimes in response to these 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, 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 freeing. 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, there's some of the best things that are ever going to happen to you. So, you know, to treasure those moments, there's 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. Yes. The nature of life on earth is that we're not living in those moments all the time. Mm-hmm. I would like to give a shout out to Addix here. I was just going to say, this is the basis of my addiction right here. I just wanna 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 true or more beautiful state of being. It's not that we're whips. 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 telling you that. It was a little bit deeper beyond. There was some piece of me that I wasn't, it was almost like there was, what I thought was,

there was like this part of me that could only be explored via alcohol, drugs, whatever. And I thought that that was a god part, not like in me. 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 that, 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, they're sweet types. Oh my god, exactly. Use 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 like 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. Yes. 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, was 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

through 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 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 it keeps you from liberating. I love that. And it's not like you have to put it all that. I feel like I'm always trying to make sense of everything in a hole. Like, 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, I'll put that 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 in pursuit of a supposedly perfect reality

that can actually never be achieved. And so you keep on just sacrificing and sacrificing until you get to that place, instead of looking for the shards wherever you find them. So if you are 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 better sweet. Okay.

A second idea that is in the book is this idea of if you're a bittersweet type, you see beauty in pain and pain and beauty. You use CS 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 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 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 dread or It's a stab. It's a stab of joy. Can you talk about that? Huh? Yeah, absolutely. It's like you see the child and, you know, splashing in the rain puddle 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, you know,

that 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 the 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 And that's what makes us cry

Yes, but I do have to say like to people who are listening to this like oh my god I mean, you know, I just have to like cry forever I have found Through being really immersed in this topic. There's something about immersing in this That 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, we're 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 it this kind of sadness is very deeply strong so tell us about

What sadness what this bitter sweetness 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 wounds, 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, of course, wrote, I know why the Kagebird 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 showed in an entire lifetime, including being raped 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 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, a birth of 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 Birth of 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 ways. Exactly, like an everyday thing, because I love the kelter. Yes. When he said, sadness is beautiful and sadness is wise.

Sadness is a meditation on compassion. And the 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 know, 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 of the

time. Combation means to suffer together. So it feels like the only choices are to suffer together or to suffer alone. So I feel like that is just that's why sentence is beautiful. That's why sentence 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 better sweet 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 scene world. I was trying to create a true or more beautiful world in my classroom where people were good to each other and everybody got to bring their full selves to the scene world. I was trying to create a true or 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, front line workers, teachers, like all of these people are usually bittersweet types that have a longing for a true or 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 you were talking Amanda about the work of Dacker Keltner, who's a psychologist, who's a life story I told in the book, and also his work. And he talks about 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 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 source code of our ability to get beyond

this worst 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 Decker-Kelner's work. He found that we all have the Vegas 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 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 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, buck up, to understand that sadness, physically, inside the body, which triggers compassion, that that is written into the code of us,

is written into the code of us as much as breathing in order to be humans. So that vagus nerve, the things that controls the breathing, the digestion of 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, right? You see something sad, it makes you care. 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 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 deal with suffering, to care. Yeah. And I think it's revolutionary and it's resistance. 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.

That's because that's how status quo continues. If nobody cares, if 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 looserish and soft. And that's why I think this bitter sweetness and way of life and caring is a bad-ass,

warrior way of life. 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, 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 bitter sweetness, 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. We can consume the art. And that can take 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 even focus 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 bitter sweetness 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.

I'm going into the idea that you were getting to. Okay, so when the pandemic first started and 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 one should I follow? And I got all these recommendations. And I'm pretty soon. My whole feed was full of art. And then I didn't really expect this.

But then I just naturally from there develop 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 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 Glenn said, you know, 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 diluted. 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. 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 night music and I'm immediately in the true more beautiful world. If I light some incense, forget about it. Gone. So there's like these little things that you can do.

And then the creating are 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, absolutely. That is 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 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, 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. So that's like the, let's 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 is 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 up 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 the shared sorrow is a way of getting us to communion that our culture has completely ignored. So it's like we have super power that helps us get to communion that we're just not even using because our culture 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 the minor key music levers, that's really what you're feeling when you feel that weird ecstasy, 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. Wow. Yeah, who are introverted and a little bit less loud than me. 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 and 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. in the world and just find somebody to be kind to today. Does that make that that's the stretch? That's the stretch between the scene world and the scene world. I just want to thank you all so much and 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 remember that seeing human is not about feeling happy all the time It's about feeling everything

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