Wrapped Up in Minutes

Image credit: Spotify

On November 30th, I joined millions of fellow listeners in reviewing the results of my Spotify Wrapped. I scrolled through data regarding my top artists, songs, and genres, striving to glean insights from my everyday music repertoire. I reminisced about the hours spent jamming to “Australian Alternative Rock” and the others spent singing along to “Show Tunes.” My “Wrapped” was not entirely unexpected nor out of the ordinary, yet one section seemed of particular interest – 32,143 “Minutes Listened.” I began to contemplate those tens of thousands of “Minutes Listened,” and the hundreds of thousands of “Minutes Not Listened.”

In Mary Oliver’s “Freshen the Flowers, She Said,” the narrator describes “fifteen minutes of music / with nothing playing.” I value its attempt to quantify my time as a listener, but Spotify seems to have underestimated the symphony of sounds beyond my headphones. “With nothing playing,” I have spent the year hearing waves crash on the shores of Cape Cod, rain splattering along Locust Walk, and dogs barking in my own backyard. I have listened to the harmonies of hundreds of emotions and caught the rhythms of my everyday trials and triumphs. 

I have come to recognize the music within each of these moments, realizing that my top artists, songs, and genres resound within my classrooms, conversations, and home, rather than a mobile application. I hope to always remember these “minutes of music with nothing playing,” wrapped forever in my heart and mind.

Freshen the Flowers, She Said by Mary Oliver

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain

was tender, 

and took out the tattered and cut each stem

on a slant,

trimmed the black and raggy leaves and set them all – 

roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies, 

and more whose names I don’t know, in bright new water – 

gave them

a bounce upward at the end to let them take

their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs,

the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,

perhaps fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of music

With nothing playing.