Vulnerability at its heart is the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control perception.
The piece is a meditation on death. Pärt's biographer, suggests that "how we live depends on our relationship with death: how we make music depends on our relationship to silence." It is significant that the piece begins and ends with silence—that the silence is written in the score. This silence creates a frame around the piece and has spiritual significance. It suggests that we come from silence, and return to silence; it reminds us that before we were born and after we die we are silent with respect to this world.