Imagine standing in a busy city behind a heavy glass door with a sound-proof seal.
Through the glass, it’s a beautiful spring day. People move with purpose. A man walks his dog. A couple leans into conversation. Traffic builds and releases at the intersection. From here, it all feels orderly. Manageable.
Now you crack the door open.
A cold wind rushes in. Exhaust. Honking. Sirens. The couple’s “quiet” conversation turns into a public argument. The noise is immediate and disorienting.
You close the door again. Silence.
But something has changed. You place your hand on the glass and feel it—the vibration. The city is still there, moving with force and urgency, whether you let the noise in or not.
That vibration is the signal.
Signal isn’t information. It’s meaning. It’s the insight that connects what’s happening around you with something deeper inside you. It’s what unifies scattered moments into a story you can act on. Without signal, there is only noise. And without meaning, creation stalls.
Most days, we’re pulled toward the noise. 24-hour news and doomscrolling social media. The noise arrives as a flood of disconnected voices, each demanding attention, each disguising itself as urgency. For people who care deeply about change, this becomes dangerous. The search for the “right” answer turns compulsive. And paradoxically, the harder we search, the less signal we receive.
Our bodies are already taking in more information than we could ever process. Without pause, momentum carries us forward. We can open the door and be overwhelmed. We can close it and retreat. Or, more skillfully, we can learn to do both.
Closing the door is not avoidance. It’s orientation.
At Pangea World Theater, artistic leaders Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherjee begin meetings by ringing a bell and holding two minutes of silence. To busy leaders, it can feel inefficient. It isn’t. It’s a collective closing of the door. Silence. Then, together, everyone puts their hand on the glass. The room settles. People arrive. Signal becomes audible. The result is not just a calmer meeting, but a better one, focused, grounded, clear. The kind that ends on time, with real next steps and people able to bring their best selves forward.
Especially now, with the intense distractions of the world around us, if we don’t create moments of intentional silence, the noise will carry us away. But when we pause, especially together, we create the conditions where signal can emerge. And once you feel it, you know exactly where to move next.