Between Two Worlds: How Rhythm Creates a Bridge Between Reality and Dream

I was inspired to write this blog post by an interview with Jill Purce, “The Faustian Pact of Western Music,” published in Tähenduse teejuht, a supplement of the Estonian newspaper Postimees. As I read the interview, I quickly realized that this was not a story about music alone. It was a story about people, rhythm, and the way repetition shapes our experience of the world—and also about how we create the future.

In the interview, Purce tells a story from her childhood. It is a simple, almost archetypal scene, yet it reveals something profound about the relationship between human beings and sound:

“My Protestant father from Northern Ireland was a very eccentric man. Once, he wanted to visit an island off the coast, about an hour away by boat. He decided we should make the journey in the middle of the night.

We set off—my brother, my mother, my father, and I. At the back of the boat sat three old women dressed in black. Suddenly, a terrible storm arose. We thought we were going to drown. It was a truly terrifying and freezing experience.

Then, all of a sudden, those same three women began to sing something like a lament. The wind died down, the storm subsided, and fear transformed into a kind of ecstasy. That was my first realization that the human voice is a magical instrument.”

Reading this story, it is difficult not to think of Estonians. The saying that we sang ourselves free is not merely a poetic metaphor or a slogan of national romanticism. It has a deep behavioral and psychological foundation. As a nation, we have preserved and strengthened rituals in which repetition and rhythm help transform fear into something that sustains us—courage, belonging, meaning.

Our Song and Dance Celebrations are not simply cultural events. They are rhythmic returns to the same note. Rituals that help a small nation become great—not in numbers, but from within. They create a culture that produces a resilient and resourceful people, capable of preserving their continuity and, when necessary, shifting the world slightly to make it a better place.

Later in the interview, Purce expresses an idea that opened up an entirely new perspective on leadership and goals for me:

“On the one hand, everything related to sound is based on measurement and counting. Any rhythm organizes our experience. If we beat a rhythm once per second, we hear the individual beats and can count them. But as the tempo increases to around sixteen beats per second, we can no longer count the beats; instead, we hear a low tone.

By its very nature, this is already a subjective experience that cannot be reduced to counting—in philosophical terms, a phenomenal quality, a quale. Sound therefore represents a bridge between the objective and subjective worlds.”

This is where the central idea of this blog post emerged: rhythm as a bridge between the objective and subjective worlds. The objective world is the one we live in today—the world of facts, metrics, and agreements. The subjective world is made up of our dreams and visions—the world we want to live in.

When we consciously maintain that bridge, possibilities begin to emerge that a goal alone cannot reveal. Just as individual beats become a tone only through rhythm, a dream becomes achievable only through repetition. And just as light reveals its colors only when passed through a prism, the different possibilities contained within a goal become visible only through rituals.

This is where the parallel with organizations and teams becomes particularly clear. Organizations, too, exist at the boundary between two worlds: on one side, today’s reality—resources, deadlines, results; on the other, the future—vision, ambition, belief. Rituals, whether meetings, regular check-ins, or shared reflections, are not fundamentally mechanisms of control. They are places where we sing together. A shared space of understanding where we hold the same note long enough to begin hearing other tones as well—new possibilities, previously unnoticed connections, different solutions.

Seen from this perspective, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are not merely a goal-setting system. They are a rhythm. A deliberately created repetition that allows a vision to refract into concrete possibilities. At the team level, OKRs work like overtone chanting. We do not keep singing a new song; instead, through repetition, we sustain a single note—a shared objective.

Quarterly focus, weekly check-ins, and regular retrospectives are not intended to force people to achieve desired results. They create resonance. They create the conditions in which the objective itself begins to reveal layers that could not be seen or articulated at the outset. New ideas do not necessarily appear—they become audible and visible. New connections emerge. New observations become possible. We discover possibilities that have always existed in the world but that we had not noticed or did not previously know how to use.

This is precisely why the true value of OKRs lies not only in achieving objectives, but in the perception that develops through this rhythm. The team begins to distinguish signal from noise. To see direction within obstacles. To hear what none of its members would have heard alone.

From this perspective, discipline also takes on a new meaning. Not coercion or self-punishment, but attunement. The decision to return, again and again, to the same note—even when we would rather rush ahead or jump to the next idea. Discipline as self-love—caring enough to ensure that the vision does not disappear into the noise of everyday life and that the rhythm does not break at the first sign of discomfort.

Bringing this train of thought back to where it began, the circle closes naturally. Jill Purce speaks of the human voice as a magical instrument capable of transforming fear into ecstasy. Not through force, but through rhythm. Not through explanation, but through sounding together. Perhaps the same is true of people and organizations. The future is not born from a leap, but from repetition—from the ability to return to the same question, the same vision, and the same sound.

Development has never been linear; it is spiral-shaped. Each turn adds a new layer of knowledge and experience, upon which a new quality can emerge—a quale that could not previously be perceived. It is through these rhythmic returns that the qualitative leap becomes possible. Not by moving faster, but by listening more deeply.