I’m told there are two sides to you. A remembering/story self and an experiencing self. Together they make the coin that is you, but you are only really allowed to be on one side or the other. When you are on the remembering/story side, you string together recollections and either project backward or forward to who you were or think you will be. It is a story flavored by your mood or something in the moment that has brought those memories forward and all they are soaked in. When you are on the experiencing side you are there, in a moment with the world, and all else drops away. There is no reconstructed you from the remembering/story side: there is just what is happening there, then.
When that moment is over, your remembering/story self immediately jumps in and puts the moment in a place, into the book of you — a liquid place where everything is clear and blurred at once, distinct but running together, sharp like the cold water of a river that is never the same no matter how often you stand in the same spot of its bend.
But somewhere in there, that process, there is a nano-second when you are on the edge of the coin. An ever-so brief nothing in time where you are both the story of you and the experience of you.
And when I am lucky, I find that place where the pen meets the paper. An inky moment where the whole of me disappears — and is there at once — and I am both the story that I am telling and the experience of telling it and the listener who is transformed by it.
It is magnificent.
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