Musing after midnight, aka writing myself to sleep

They say artists spend their whole lives repeating themselves. Composers do. Painters do. Writers do. But I think in a sense we are all artists. We all see the world from a different vantage point, some from the eagle's nest, some from the top of the anthill, some riding the river on a log like an adventurous raccoon (or maybe even having the time of our lives digging through what someone else considers garbage). Each of us sees life from a different angle, and therefore we see a limited part of the whole. But in that part we see patterns.

Humanity is like a movie score with every track playing at once, but each track is the theme song for a different character, and that theme describes in the same basic set of notes reiterated in multiple keys and slight variations the ideas and tone of that character's existence. Drawing from the same octaves of notes and the same orchestra of instruments, each song shares similar characteristics with others, but the combination is different. Each one is upbeat or adagio, major or minor, simple or complex based on the individual's unique assortment of life circumstances. But although each song varies in tempo and key along the way, it keeps returning to the same theme.

Humans are storytelling beings. We tell stories even when we're not trying, simply in the topics we bring up and the way we describe what's going on in our lives. The stories we tell over and over show what's important to us. They betray the thoughts upmost in our minds, the themes we see every day repeated from our vantage point. They tell us a lot about where we've been and where we're going, if we stop to listen. The lessons we learned at seven years old are relearned more completely at 15, and 26, and 50. We may not know what our theme song sounds like until we get much further down the road. Nonetheless, our song is playing, and its sublyrical message is already repeating in a slightly different way than it did a few measures ago, cementing itself in our perspective and the perspective of those around us. We would benefit from paying attention.