A deliberate slowness

Puzzle progress as of last night.

Kinda like semi-retirement, but not....

Sometimes life grinds to a halt; projects sputter, poor health intrudes, ideas meander as new shinies flex their muscles. Sometimes all of that is tangled together, sometimes separate. Sometimes the best laid plans simply go awry.

Right now life feels that way. My life, but perhaps others. Probably others. Maybe heaps of others. Today I finished the letters portion of Letters and Papers From Prison. Appendices remain, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his brother Klaus, and their brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rudiger Schleicher were executed for their roles in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Hindsight provides as much information as exists, yet for all their prayers and wishes, those men, and so many other people, did not survive that awful war.

My still aching shoulder precludes serious hand-sewing. Typing out journal entries from 2002 hinders new written work. Gray windy weather hampers my small gardening efforts. Other endeavors within my existence feel hemmed in by this, that, and another hurdle or three. It's as though I am severely curtailed on many fronts, other than the puzzle. The puzzle is coming together just fine.

That's quite the irony; a puzzle purchased on a whim a couple of weeks ago has turned into my daily focus. I'm not a puzzle aficionado, or I wasn't until a few days ago. Now that puzzle seems to own me, or at the very least I am seriously drawn to it. I'd rather be consumed with other hobbies; instead at this juncture of April, a puzzle is my focus.

Puzzles aren't for more than passing time, yet they harbor greedy tendancies. They take up space, so allowances must be made for their inclusion. They demand fierce concentration, otherwise why sit there and mull over myriad shapes and hues for just the right piece, one single piece of a large-ish THING to go precisely in one small spot. But maybe that's all we are, solitary parts of one ENORMOUS whole and if even one of us goes missing, the planet veers off kilter.

Maybe that's one truth of this life, maybe.

In reading a book like Letters and Papers From Prison, invariable I consider: What if Dietrich, etc, hadn't been imprisoned? What if Dietrich and his fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer had gotten their chance at happiness? What if the Nazis had been foiled far sooner than they had; what if, what if, what if? Millions wouldn't have died, etc, etc, etc. Yet that wasn't what their lives were destined to be. For over two years Bonhoeffer dwelled in captivity, hoping in vain to be released. Von Dohnanyi spent that same amount of time in jail, while Klaus and Rudiger were detained in autumn of 1944. All four men were murdered in April of 1945, literally at the war's end there in Europe.

Those four lives were slivers of existences when stacked against the vast catalogue of human loss in World War II. Eighty years has past since the end of that conflict; those years have not passed with deliberate slowness, but the rapidity that seems to only grow as I get older. And yet moments emerge as if the earth has stopped spinning, as though nothing matters more than completing a puzzle. In my realm, for whatever reason, all that seems vital is a Lego puzzle.

Perhaps so I can absorb more essential truths, learned in Dietrich's letters. Maybe to better pray for my beloveds and the rest currently living on this marvelous but frustrating world. Possibly to shore up my inner mettle for future curiosities and marvels; I won't hazard a guess, at least not consciously. All I will do is offer these musings and recommend Letters and Papers From Prison if you need something new to read. Something that benefits from a deliberate slowness, puzzle piecing at your own discretion.