Remember the linguistic origins of the word yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet. But to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy," as the University of Nevada clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychol- ogy Today article he wrote called “From Loss to Love." "In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”

‘When you talk about longing, it's so huge, I don't know where it stops. Home isn't a place. Home is where that longing is, and you don't feel good until you're there. In the end, it's one big yearning. In Sufism, they call it the pain. In Sufism, they call it the cure.’

They had the ability to lose themselves in fictional characters in books and movies, and they responded to others' troubles with compassion, rather than with personal discomfort or anxiety. For them, sad music was likely a form of communion.

The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a de- sired state of gentle sorrow brought about by "the pathos of things" and “a sensitivity to impermanence"

Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.