Monika

“Empathy is not relating to an experience, it’s connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2]”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole