Stretching the vessel with longing
I have been wrestling with how to articulate an experience I am having, which I’ll call the “Both / I Don’t Know.”
The concept is this: What if something feels painful and beautiful at the same time, and that lingers? Recently I journaled, “I’m sad, but there’s also a sense of bliss in the background at the same time.”
Have you experienced anything similar?
Often when I am exploring an emotional dynamic or relational experience, the world talks to me through songs and billboards, stories and shows. I ended up listening to Tim Ferriss’s interview with Susan Cain who is author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and who released a new book entitled Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
“What I’ve learned is that this bittersweet tradition, it’s been with us for centuries. And what it teaches us is that we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty.”
— Susan Cain
Aha. How is it that when we feel great love, we get sad? Why is there something something poignant and beautiful about grief? Are beauty and pain married? Love opens us to vulnerability. Beauty embodies finality. This too shall pass is a truism, regardless of the nature of the condition. This is the Both.
So what’s left?
The lingering / I don’t know. A state of Longing for clarity, for truth, for what was, for what could be.
Being in love passes, sadness passes, elation passes, grief passes. We always return to being a drop in the ocean longing for lost or future states. But in pausing to hang with the state of Longing, and not reaching for the past or future with will and determination, Truth happens. Expansion is possible. The Both / I Don’t Know opens us to be big enough to hold all the feelings that are seemingly opposites. For me, that’s capacity. And the more capacity I have, the more resilience I have. That’s useful for a busy life. In withholding action by dwelling in the ocean of Longing (and tolerating it), I am becoming a larger vessel.
I will leave you a quote from one of my characters in an illustrated novel I’m working on. She is looking for a place to live with her daughter and in embracing the state of ‘having no place,’ communes with nature for solace and clarity.
“In the beginning and in the end, you are a seeker, a survivor, a giver and a receiver. Everyone longs for something.”
From here I write. From here I love.
La douleur exquise. I’ve always been fascinated by my relationship to this. Some might call it addictive. I think it is for many…There’s a song I love by Dawes called “Time Spent in Los Angeles”: “you’ve got that special kind of sadness…” It’s the stuff of movies, how the lows make the highs higher and the low itself is some kind of high we’re used to and find ways to come back to–sweet pain. I’ve always battled with my lust for longing, but it is a deep part of me, as it is for many soulful people. Yet I’m always moving to change my relationship to the feeling itself: for me, it is not a state of being I want to continue to seek (a curse), but one that I can also appreciate as one of my strengths (a somewhat indulgent ability to relish times of sorrow).
Thank you for responding from the heart. One to add to the list of topics we could talk about for hours ♥️