To Listen With An Open Heart To An Untold Story

The reality you observe is the lost essence within you, waiting to be continually revealed.

Last night, in the Iași Railway Station area, I met a poor man playing a worn-out accordion. His hands, battered – you could tell they were worn out by years of hard work – were clutching the bellows as if it were a last hope, perhaps just out of a desire to snatch a sliver of beauty from a gray day. "I can't sing better than that," he confessed to me, with a hint of resignation, like a weary soldier who puts down his weapon not out of weakness but out of reconciliation. "You need finesse to touch the sensitive chord of a passerby, and even a certain sense of authentic vibration, to transform pain into melody."

With some shyness, I looked him in the eye with that lucid compassion of a traveler who has seen too much unspoken suffering in the eyes of men. Out of a tender helplessness, I went to the shop across the street, bought him a hot meal, and said to him, "Sing as if for your soul." I thought that when someone sings for himself, heaven listens with the boundless silence of eternity.

And in that almost sacred moment, when he pressed the first key with a barely perceptible tremor, the air changed, rising like an unspoken prayer. His melody, until then mechanical, more of a tired automatism of the fingers, suddenly transformed into a living score, a "Sylphara Cantoris" – a call of the soul that resonates beyond the noise of the world. The notes rose and fell, like the waves of an unseen river, each trill and glissando awakening something deep in my chest. Nothing is more heartbreaking and healing than music springing from a wounded but living heart. It was as if the entire station, with its walls stained by time, had become a cathedral of unfiltered emotion, and the accordion – a voice of the eternal.

Leadership: Can you transform personal suffering into an authentic creation that resonates with others through its raw honesty?

Well, his rigorous discipline, of singing "after hours" for extra money, hid an almost mystical secret, a kind of poetic tenacity: even in toil, the soul can create beauty. It can create sound light, just like a painter paints a sunset from a cold and dark studio. Only then, when I listened to him with the silence of someone learning to feel, did I learn that music is not just sound, but confession. Leadership begins where a man assumes to sing not for applause, but for the truth within him, for the unspoken fragment of sacredness within him.

Clearly, the accordion was not just an instrument, but a mirror of the heart, something that pushes pain to turn into sound and silence to become a story. Just like in "One Thousand and One Nights", where Scheherazade wove stories to defeat death, the young man sang to defeat the weight of life. And just like Sinbad found treasures in the midst of storms, I found unspeakable and deep meanings, hidden in the vibration of a note drawn with hope in the melody of a simple man, like a living prayer in a station forgotten by time.

And if I had compared him to an artist like Caravaggio, capturing the light in the shadows of a scene, I would have understood, even then, that leadership is the art of bringing beauty out of the everyday gray, so that even a train station can become a work of sound art, a cathedral of emotions. Each note was an unspoken story, a page from the great book of the soul. Undoubtedly, his song was a lived science, not learned, an unspoken prayer that ascended to the sky with a broken but courageous melodic line, leaving behind echoes that vibrated in the chest of the one who truly listened. When tired hands sing for the soul, they touch the invisible strings of eternity.

Leadership: Can you accept that your true finesse in fulfilling the act of creation comes from assumed vulnerability, not from perfect control of the form you assign to your inner world?

Scheherazade managed to survive the tragic fate of the sultan's other wives, who were beheaded after a single night, by applying a brilliant strategy. Each night, she would tell the sultan a captivating and personalized story, but would interrupt it just before the end, promising to finish it later. Eager to know the rest, the sultan would postpone her execution, telling her: "Not now, my dear. We can wait until tomorrow." For a thousand and one nights, this technique kept the permission to continue alive, and finally, after three years, the sultan gave up his plan, transforming Scheherazade into a living queen.

And the young man's song promised an ever-postponed revelation. Under the leaden sky of the train station, I learned that every man carries an unspoken song. The young man sang more beautifully than I had expected, and his notes, like sounds that connect the earth to the stars, awakened a question in me: what does it mean to live miraculously? For, just as each page of my writings changes with each reading, so too, his melody changes with each listening, revealing new layers of meaning. An anonymous song can keep the question of the miraculous meaning of existence burning, just as the narrative thread kept a queen alive. Indeed, his song carried the same promise of a life held in suspense by a few sounds, like the stories that saved Scheherazade.

Leadership: Can you transform your existence into an expression that expands the perspective on the value of a present moment, without compromising the authenticity of your story?

An hour passed, then another hour. The train came and I left for Bucharest. Somehow, I left with a heavy but enlightened heart. For I realized that the young man was not singing for money, but to remember who he was. Isn't that right? Even outside the oriental palaces there are voices that save their souls through the beauty of the story sung night after night, like a silent pact with life. Every man carries an accordion of the soul, but few dare to sing for heaven.

I wondered then what I could do to transform my own labor into a sacred story. With trembling and courage, I bent over my own life, like a scribe of eternity, knowing that each moment could be a page in a greater work. And all that I have written here, now, with tired hands, with hope held in the corner of my heart, is only to remember that a story told with a sincere heart saves the soul from oblivion, even when no one applauds.

So uplifting and relentless in its sincerity, writing is the form through which my heart beats once more, and once more, but always differently. And when it beats, when it beats louder and louder, it is a sign that a truth still burns within me that wants to be spoken. And this is just the beginning of another story...

True leadership is the proof of the patience to sustain the essence of a vision, which brings constant revelation. It transforms the fragility of the present moment into the silent testimony of all that the soul does not dare to speak, but aspires to live.

Listening with an open heart to an unspoken story means receiving the gratitude of the other, beyond the apparent noise of the world and one's own judgment.

Only then, in the deserted train station, did I learn that a simple song can be a prayer, and that the tired hands of a man can draw maps of the sky, calling to an eternal story. Only thus could I see the unseen, only thus could I understand what was never told to me. For these reasons I will step forward, carrying within me what is not forgotten: the truth sung without words.