Guarding Your Signal in a Noisy World

This past week I found myself knee-deep in noise — the digital kind and the everyday kind.
Emails stacked with spam. The phone ringing with “likely spam” warnings. News cycles circling the same headlines with a thousand competing opinions, half of them disguised as sales pitches. Even at the grocery store, a row of impulse buys seemed less like food and more like carefully designed interruptions.

But then came clarity: what’s mine to carry, what’s mine to invest — is time and energy.

The Seed of It

Over dinner with my daughter and son-in-law, I watched the shift that happens when life presses close. His father’s health is failing. These are strong, accomplished people, but suddenly their calendars and ambitions bent under the weight of something deeper. Priorities re-ordered in real time. A silent reminder that everything we fight for eventually reduces to what matters most.

We are gladiators, all of us. Each day, thrown into the ring — sometimes prepared, sometimes not. Every fight costs energy. Every choice spends time. But how often do we assess the trade? None of us knows the life of the battery. None of us can see the balance left in the wallet.

What Noise Is Designed to Do

Noise isn’t random. It is engineered to steal time and energy. To keep us in patterns, comfortable ruts, autopilot days. Survival disguised as progress.

But art — in its many forms — exists to break that inertia. A song, a story, a painting, even a single phrase of graffiti on a wall. They disrupt. They spark. They remind us that life is more than repetition, more than the next item on the to-do list.

A Glimpse From My Own Life

I grew up surrounded by micro-stories, tossed around the dinner table or repeated at the right moment. I didn’t realize until later that they weren’t just entertainment — they were lessons, pearls of wisdom.

“Do it now — it’s later than you think.”
“People who travel the same path only dig ruts.”
“If you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

My grandfather and father spoke in fragments that became fuel. It was drip teaching, wisdom arriving in phrases that stayed long after the moment passed. That language still lives in me, shaping the way I see noise and the way I guard against it.

Noise is engineered to steal time — art is designed to give it back.

The Takeaway

You will spend your entire life with yourself. Be who you want to be.
Invest your time and energy wisely.
And may you have God’s speed in fighting the noise.