Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering
And nine other Bittersweet ideas
The other day, I received a note from a Quiet Life reader, telling me how much she’d enjoyed the “Top Ten Teachings” from my 2022 book, BITTERSWEET: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole".
I appreciated her letter, and hadn’t thought about this list in a while. So I thought I’d share it with you today.
BITTERSWEET: HOW SORROW AND LONGING MAKE US WHOLE:
Ten Key Ideas
Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go.
Transform your pain into beauty, your longing into belonging.
The art we love best, the music we love most, express our yearning for a perfect and beautiful world.
Upbeat tunes make us dance around our kitchen and invite friends for dinner. But sad music makes us want to touch the sky.
Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.
Creativity has the power to look pain in the eye and turn it into something else.
Our oldest problem is the pain of separation, our deepest dream is the desire for reunion.
We all experience spiritual longing, whether we’re atheists, believers in the deities of the ancient books, or something else, or somewhere in between.
We transcend grief only when we realize how connected we are with all the other humans who struggle to transcend theirs.
We’re just humans: flawed and beautiful and longing for love.
As usual, I’d love to know your thoughts:
*Did any of these ideas especially strike a chord?
and
*Are there any of them you’d like to hear more about, in future Kindred Letters?
(I could also point you to the relevant chapters from the book; and/or to the Bittersweet Practices and Reflections audio course.)
When my wife Diane died suddenly in the COVID spring of 2021, some sixty years after we began falling in love in our senior year in high school, I think it was Maria Popova in one of her "Marginalian" blogs that mentioned you and your book "Bittersweet." I looked it up and googled one of your TED talks, was immediately enthralled, and went out and got your book. To make a long story short, it resonated deeply, and I might say profoundly. The ten-item list has been on "our" refrigerator door ever since. To this day, it gives me the emotional/intellectual framework I need (needed) to cope, create, and find the energy to grow. The "list," the book, seemed to provide an accessible pathway to levels of feeling I never thought I had. (I even find myself playing Leonard Cohen's songs all the time). And like some other commenters in the Quiet Life community, I've noted, I, too, have made it a practice of giving copies of Bittersweet to folks I thought might benefit from it as I have. I've never done that before, and it still amazes me. What you have created in your writing and "candlelight" gatherings, I think, is extraordinary. Thank you again for sharing your humanity so well.
#10 is so hard for me to hold onto now as I watch the world. It's hard to see hateful, power-hungry people as beautiful or longing for love. Yet if we dehumanize them, we add to the hatred in the world, which gets us nowhere. Thank you for the reminder that we can choose to see ourselves as connected to other flawed souls by virtue of our humanity, even if we reject their behavior and choices.