How many times have you found yourself in the middle of a story

How many times have you found yourself in the middle of a story, which sounds rather like a monologue, a story which is so familiar to you, so personal perhaps, but here you are hearing it once again, going through every known passage once more, and expecting, almost you could say, “predicting” what is to come once more?! Yes, indeed, how many times you would want to stop the narrator from continuing the tale, while at the same time you cannot wait for the next word to drop, very much like you wait for the next note of a famous song, or melody that you know and love so much!? How many times you feel the inextricable need to feel once again the experiences narrated in that story that flows through your mind?! How much fuel do we seem to get from it!? But then, one day, at one point, on some occasion, you begin to realize that the only reason this is so familiar to you is because it is in fact you who is telling the story. You understand that there was never another narrator, that this “has been and is your story”. You realize that from time to time you have the primordial need to bring it out of the old storage cabinet in the back of your mind, to expose once again the aspects of this story, now a monologue, that resurfaces to the light of our now, to tell another person, the value of our experience, and perhaps this is where we find our own true value. But the story although is always the same, it always picks up some new nuance or detail to color, or to better fit the current reality of the moment. We stress different aspects, or we sustain, or perhaps exaggerate some aspects of this version of the story, just like a director sometimes enhances the string, or the wind sessions of an orchestra at different points according to what his current need or interpretation dictates. Yes, the story is not always the same we can conclude, because as we add or subtract from it, some of these new elements become permanent elements of the story like new starting players in the team, that go on to be veterans, some get their jerseys retired, and some are lost in the oblivion of that old storage cabinet in the back of the mind with the hope of someday coming back to that story as it is told yet one more time. ACD 03.02.20