You Are Worth Hearing - Life Wisdom #67

In ancient China, there lived a musician named Bo Ya, who played the qin, the long seven-string zither of scholars, so beautifully that his name is still remembered wherever that instrument is played.

Many people admired his playing, and yet only one of them heard it as he meant it, a woodcutter named Zhong Ziki, Ziki to his friends, who had become his closest companion.

When Boyar played with his mind on high mountains, Ziki would close his eyes and murmur that the music rose like Mount Tai, steep and splendid against the sky.

When the musician's thoughts turned to flowing water, his friend would say that he could hear great rivers rolling toward the sea, wide and unhurried.

Whatever the musician held in his heart as he played, Ziki found it in the sound, as if the strings carried the thought from one man directly into the other.

Once, the Liezi relates, the two friends were caught by a storm at the foot of Mount Tai and took shelter under a great rock, where Boyar began to play to pass the time.

He played the sound of falling rain, then the crash of a mountain giving way, and each time Ziki named what he heard, until the musician laid his chin down in amazement.

Your hearing is so fine, he told his friend, that what you picture is exactly what I was thinking, and I have nowhere left to hide my music from you.

Chinese has kept a word from this friendship, which is Zhiyin, literally the one who knows the sound, still used today for the rare friend who understands us without explanation.

Boyar's words under that rock describe what most of us long for in our closest relationships, to be heard so clearly that nothing true in us has to stay hidden.

Anyone who has had such a friend knows the feeling in the body, the shoulders that drop, and the sentences that no longer need to be prepared.

Even the silences change, lasting a long time without any discomfort.

With a Zhiyin, we can be tired, confused, or half-formed, and still be recognized as Bo Ya could play an unfinished thought and know that his friend would follow it.

The story ends in grief, as so many great friendships do, because Ziki died before his friend, and Bo Ya, according to the old chronicles, broke his chin, cut its strings, and never played again.

He felt that nobody left in the world was worth playing for.

And I understand that despair, although I have come to believe that his music deserved a different fate.

Most of us have had a Zhiyin at some point in our lives, a friend at university, a grandmother, a partner in the early years, someone in whose presence we felt entirely audible.

What troubles us is that the same people can, over the years, stop hearing the music, even while they love us as much as ever, and we are left playing in a room where everyone is talking.