It’s interesting that in Japanese the word naru means both “to become” and “to sound.” So, if to live is to be clear, to become is to sound or express what is lived. And while a bird sings for no audience, a lion roars for its mate, and a widowed whale emits deep melancholies as it searches the ocean for its other half. So, while not always necessary, expressing what is lived implies expressing it to another. It implies being heard and received. For while experiencing something freshly is exhilarating, being heard is validating. Just as our heads are free to the sky while our feet are kept to the ground, our feelings are free as they are felt, but their reception is inevitably grounded in the hearts of others. Ironically, both are necessary to sustain meaningful living: the act of feeling and the reception of feeling, both of which involve expression.

Yet why—though it is always so—why is the cost of being heard attachment? Why do we feel bound to the one who has heard? Perhaps it’s God’s way of pollinating the best of our secrets. Perhaps our need to be heard causes us to bond with another, long enough for a tireless energy to be released, as when molecules bond to deepen the color of an orchid. Perhaps the exchange of clarity we know as being inside another’s skin is the result of a metaphysical union equivalent to intercourse through which we conceive and propagate spirit.

Whatever the case, a deeply intrinsic nature drives us into the lives of others where being heard and received verify our existence, while being attached begins to erode our most private self in both healthy and unhealthy ways. When healthy, our attachments fuse like the arms of Egyptian lovers entwined so long that when unearthed they are thought to be one. But when our attachments preclude what is central, we are diminished as when a spouse never lets their loved one venture far enough to have a separate experience to share.

The native task—of being and becoming, of living clearly and sounding fully—is sorely exacerbated by our social and moral imperatives to fit in. Ironically, we make heroes of true individuals in retrospect, while censuring true individuality when we meet it on the street. For human history has always swayed in its want to stand apart and its want to belong, in its want to live clearly in solitude and its want to sound fully in the company of others.