"TURN SORROW INTO CREATIVITY, BEAUTY AND LOVE"

Bittersweet is a best-selling book by Susan Cain.  Her themes are speaking to me and may to you too. Perhaps you cry in movies, are moved by Shakespearean tragedies, cozy up on rainy days or enjoy melancholy music from Country to classic, Roy Orbison to Mahler (his Symphony No.6 in A minor is called dark and terrifying).   Barber's Adagio for Strings takes the movies The Elephant Man (1980), Platoon (1986) and Lorenzo's Oil (1992) to another level.  I'm listening to Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor as I write. 

In this blog we've discussed the "andness" of life.  Never is it one thing or another.  Always both.  We have survival fears even as we enjoy this greening spring.  We worry for our children even as we admire their growing independence. As threats grow, so does importance.  The shorter one's life, the more precious each day.  The dichotomies are many. 

Cain defines bittersweet as "a tendency to states of longing, poignancy and sorrow, an acute awareness of passing time and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world...and the recognition that light and dark, birth and death--bitter and sweet--are forever paired."   

Many of us respond to sad music.  In "Annie's Song" by John Denver are the words "Let me die in your arms."  Because of something my young son said to his wife during his last weeks as a cancer patient, these are the most poignant words I know.  Sometimes I want to hear the song, sometimes I can't bear it.  

Even tragedy can be bittersweet.  It means that we have been blessed by something immeasurable that is now lost.  We loved and were loved, when the loss is greatest. We are not, as a character of Henry James discovers to his heartbreak in "The Beast in the Jungle," a person to whom nothing was destined to happen.  

No one avoids sorrow. In accepting it we learn that the place in which we suffer is the same place from which we care.  As we suffer our compassion grows and we do not dismiss the sorrow of others.  We scorn no one's tears, not least our own. Sorrow is a useful antidote to the oft-overdone advice to be tough, optimistic, and assertive.  And while we can't rid ourselves of pain, we can turn it into something else. We can take whatever it is that we do--write, act, study, dance, compose, innovate, teach, parent, design, plant, help, listen, give--and make it a creative offering.  The next time sorrow is my lot, I'm going to try.  

                                         In peace, Nina Naomi