I let one song move me

The song is loud and I am moving and there is nobody here to have an opinion about any of it. I am going to do this far more often. It cost me three minutes and it has changed the temperature of the entire evening, which is a return I would not believe if somebody described it to me.

The floor is doing that thing floors do when the volume is up. I am out of breath faster than I expected and laughing about it. Something on a shelf is buzzing slightly and I am not going to do anything about that either. The neighbors can manage. It is one song.

I stopped doing this at some point without ever deciding to. Somewhere between being a person and being busy, three minutes of joy quietly stopped making the list, and nothing arrived to replace it. Nobody takes this away from you. It falls off the edge while you are dealing with things that seemed more important at the time and mostly were not. The things that get cut first are always the ones nobody else is waiting on, which means they are almost always the ones that existed purely for me. That is a strange filter to run a life through and I ran it for years. Nobody schedules joy, which is exactly why it is the first thing to go and the last thing to come back.

Three minutes is nothing and it changes the temperature of a whole evening. This is the cheapest good thing available to me and I keep forgetting that it exists, which is a genuinely strange thing to be bad at. There is no barrier here. No equipment, no scheduling, no skill, no cost, no preparation, no other person required. The only reason I do not do it is that it does not occur to me, and that is a problem I can solve by deciding once rather than by deciding every day. Three minutes is available to me on the worst day I am ever going to have.

So I play the one I love, loudly, and I move for three minutes. Badly is not only allowed, it is most of the point, because doing it well would require an audience and there is not one. Three minutes. One song. No warm up, no reason, and no plan for what happens afterward. Then I go back to whatever I was doing, three minutes lighter than I was.

Still out of breath. Still smiling. Three minutes.