You’re most welcome, youngmentor, and thanks for the compliment!
Yes, definitely, context and sense are what command the tenses in the English language, and the strict prescriptions for them in grammar books are just for stand-alone sentences. In narratives and expositions, there’s great flexibility in the use of the tenses. Indeed, the actual determining factors for tense usage are the point of view and the timeline used by the writer or speaker. In essays, poetry, and fiction, for instance, most writers consistently use the past tense when speaking about things that happened in the past, but every now then, we come across writers who always speak in the present tense and recount everything in the past as if they are happening right at the moment of speaking. This is the stuff that stream of consciousness is made of. What this means is that the tenses are just formal guideposts for us to distinguish between events and things in the past, in the present, and in the future. The tenses are far from absolute, but we need them to make better sense of our own experiences and thoughts as they happen in time and to communicate them contextually and meaningfully to other people.