Elena Olympia Collins

This is a letter to all of us.

Everywhere we turn, there’s noise. Not just the obvious kind. Not just the traffic, or the chatter, or the endless pinging of our phones. There’s also a subtle kind of noise that creeps up on us.

It’s the pressure to react. The pressure to have an opinion. The pressure to keep up with everything. It’s a hum that never stops, and it wears us down in ways we don’t always notice.

I have in the past, caught myself reaching for my phone in the middle of the night. Not because I needed anything, but because the silence felt uncomfortable. That’s how deep the conditioning goes: even rest feels wrong unless it’s filled with something.

But here’s the truth: silence isn’t empty. It’s not a gap to be filled. It’s a space that provides renewal. It restores us. It’s like the pauses that we don’t realise, are there between each musical note, that give our favourite songs the power to touch our heart and become so very memorable. And when we lose that silence, we lose the chance to hear ourselves.

Just like an endless note with no pauses would destroy the music, endless noise in our lives prevents us from truly hearing our own simple truth.

The world is engineered to keep us scrolling, and reacting, and consuming. But silence is still here. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s waiting in the cracks.

We find it when we close our laptops, when we leave our earbuds at home, and when we let the room be still for a moment longer than feels comfortable.

Here in Australia, we commemorate the fallen soldiers every year. On a day that we call Anzac Day. Many Australians wake up before sunrise, and walk out to the end of their driveways, or onto their balconies, with a candle lit in commemoration of the bravest among us. We listen to the official Anzac Day “Last Post”. And then, we simply stand in silence for 2 minutes and watch the sun rise.

It can feel a bit strange, standing in silence in the dark, in our pyjamas and holding a single candle of light. But it’s also incredibly healing to remember the truth that sits inside that silence.

So, here’s an invitation for us, the Collective. Tonight, before we scroll one more time, before we check one more feed, let’s stop. Just for two minutes. No sound, no screen, no input of any kind. Let it feel awkward. Let it feel like it’s a withdrawal.

That awkwardness is the doorway. That’s the place where we start to hear our collective voice again.

This isn’t about rejecting the world or pretending that we can escape from it. It’s about remembering that silence is survival. It’s the ground we stand on when the noise tries to sweep us away.

And so, this is our letter. The letter to the Collective.

Signed in silence, carried through noise.

The quiet exists, even when we forget.

It’s for all of us.

And each of us.

And will always be that way.

It’s ours.