Hamlet is driven by a meeting of Hamlets: the prince and his father’s ghost. The melancholy, rootless ghost of the murdered king beseeches his son to leave his companions and follow. In the slightly truncated archaic Elizabethan language, the line is then: ‘List, list, o list’ It’s a heartfelt plea.

It can be profoundly helpful to have someone do nothing but listen: be attentive in an active, focused way. I am new to therapy and hadn’t appreciated the simple, significant benefit of someone doing this. They absorb, they bear witness to my words, no matter how disjointed or shapeless. Offering no more than a gentle hand – a small question, or a suggested interpretation, which reflects my incoherence back with a flattering suggestion of clearer self-expression, putting it better than I was able to manage for myself. Friends do this as well, of course, but more reciprocally. The particular luxury of therapy is the imbalance. It really is ‘all about me’.

I am, it will come as no surprise to learn, verbose in therapy sessions. Ideas tumble forth almost purposelessly and, unresistingly distractible, I follow streams of thought instinctively, allusively, until I am brought short by the words that cohere and I recognise, sometimes in surprise, a form of truth. The only comfort I can offer to my tolerant therapist is that I have been even worse at home, writing compulsively and incessantly. There is a huge difference between verbosity and articulacy and I know which side I have been on.

The act of speaking and being listened to in this way is, for me, deeply therapeutic in and of itself, relieving anxiety and pressure, whether or not it leads to any decision or conclusion. Frequently I think of Dumbledore extracting troublesome, painful thoughts with his wand and placing them safely, separately, in the pensieve.

There is much more to be done in addressing the problems which led me to need these sessions, but for me it had to start with being listened to: being granted a voice with which to express my own, personal, chaotic, idiosyncratic, idiolectic take on being me. To have this starting point accepted – listened to – gives it validity and respect. From that point I can start to apply my rational capacity to interpret and understand, consider choices and changes, but it has had to start from the honesty of self-expression.

I am resolved to try to listen better in return. So often I speak too soon: eagerly jumping in, often interrupting. I want to confirm my interpretation, I anticipate where speaker is heading, I am drawn to completing the story for myself. This urge is driven by my own (dare I say highly developed?) imaginative engagement, an over-eager empathy, trying to put myself in the other’s place, feeling with them. But the instinctive way to do that is to imagine oneself, myself in their place and, in truth, that’s so often exactly what is not helpful. The other person is not me, they are precisely ‘other’. Therefore, their experience is not what I have had, nor would have had even if I’d been in the same situation. In my rush to feel alongside, I forget that they are different. And listening, respectfully and attentively, gives credence to that essential truth. I cannot know what it is like to be someone else: so I must listen to the words they use to describe it for themselves. We each have our own story to tell.

I am trying hard to develop this skill of listening: I believe it to be the most important thing I can do as I try to consider the future. It’s a great, and deserved, humane courtesy which I owe to another; it may well be the most help I can give; and it will be the most sure way for me to understand and, therefore, be in a position to make informed, considered, more secure decisions.

Listen, I find, is from the Northumbrian lysna and in Old English became hlysnan “to listen, hear; attend to, obey”. Behind that are proto-Germanic, Old High German roots, and links to Sanskrit, Persian, Slavonic, Persian, Greek, Irish, Welsh. It is, once more, part of a vocabulary rooted deeply into our consciousness, with the older linguistic roots that I often reach towards at the moment. In this case, it states a universal need for self-expression with someone there to hear our voice and respond. Coincidentally, I have just been to Northumbria, to the familiar in all senses. My brother lives there, in the town he has made his home for nearly forty years. It is, indeed, a place where people listen.
I don’t know whether hylsnan is also related to hwaet. This is the first word in Beowulf, and several other Anglo-Saxon poems, and, I think, was the traditional way for an oral storyteller to start their tale. It commands attention, it announces that the story is about to begin, it is an invocation. In the 19th century it would probably have been translated as ‘Lo!’ or ‘Hark!’. Stephen Sondheim reached for the same effect with his opening word in Sweeney Todd ‘Attend’.

What we are told may not, of course, be the truth – in fact it cannot, however sincere the intention. Storytelling is always a creative act; shaping and interpretation are intrinsic to finding the words. To tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ is an ideal which none of us, however well intentioned, can actually achieve. Truth is an absolute which we can use only as an orientation point: something to aim for and to reset our direction towards every time we fail. Like marriage vows. Unattainable, unachievable, impossible. The key thing is to keep trying to head in that direction. When I was seven I made my promise as a Brownie Guide: ‘I promise that I will do my best’. That’s all any of us can ever ask.

Because we can never be told the truth, we learn to listen with discernment. My final word. Via Old French (13th century) it comes directly from the Latin discernere: to separate, set apart, divide, distribute, distinguish, perceive. The root ‘cernere’ is from a Proto-Indo-European root ‘krei’ which means ‘to sieve’. Gloriously, it ‘forms all or part of’ (amongst others) ‘ascertain, certain, concern, concert, crime, crisis, critic, criterion, decree, discreet, discriminate, excrement, garble, hypocrisy, incertitude, secret’ and, by one of those odd little shifts, ‘riddle’.

A riddle, of course, is so phrased as to require ingenuity in ascertaining its meaning. It’s also a verb. It’s the word my mother used in connection with the fire in the hearth: you riddle the grate. Shake the residue of the old fire to allow the soft ash to fall through and be left with the clinker, the nuggets which can be used to build a new fire. It’s the action of someone panning for gold.

Listen.