Puzzles.

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Beside the big puzzles, each day I seek to solve smaller and larger puzzles.  Some will take the rest of my life and never be fully solved, or remain solved.  Memory what it is, and the softness of reality as we can understand it or contain it, changes, and time, among other oddities and variables make solving even what should be manageable, or even what is manageable, a success and not a known.  If you learn to hold your breath for five minutes, will you be able to do that five years from that point?  If you solve a rubics cube, even to memorizing the pattern, is this something you will know ten years from now?  Such is life.  Focusing on needs and some wants requires what had been, and what might become, needs and wants, to whiter in the mind, will, and way.  A gift as much as a price.

This day I found myself puzzling life and love.  The past, the present, and the future, regarding these things.  I look for words thought and music, to explore, explain, or even muddy those waters.  The finest definitions and the clearest of thinking cannot overcome emotion, sentiment, even tradition.  If logic were purely true, and we were purely logical, we wouldn't be people.  Machines?  Perhaps.  Never mind.  I slipped into exploring the mechanics behind what I found myself considering just here.  Back to the topic.

I remember my various attempts at love.  My early years of libertine love, through naivete, ignorance, even innocence.  Sex was an activity.  No gain, no loss, just something to do while engaging with a beautiful creature.  As time and maturity caught up with the idea, as the reality of pregnancy and emotional and practical implications, social expectations, and so on became a part of the equation, the seemingly ideal libertine approach had to be sidelined.  While that did continue for some time, it became a thing that either had to be surrendered, or kept but at a dear price to the idea that I was good.  My first real foray into the more adult notion of love and sex ended quite tragically.  Not long after, tragedies in other areas, and health failure, lead to an inability to do anything but act and react, almost blindly.  I couldn't know love because I couldn't feel it.


I don't mind breaking hearts.  And while there is no fairness in love, or the potential for it, there are better, more right ways, to do things.  No longer will I promise what I won't keep to one I should not have offered such a promise.  Whether it is because she, or I, am undeserving doesn't matter.  While I know, no matter who I might find to love, I will break her heart.  I just won't leave her alone with that.  A tin man, yes.  I was made heartless by the road I once traveled and the destinations.  While I have lost my heart, it has been replaced.  As with the books... not by a wizard, or in real life by a doctor, but by a God who has deigned me to live, and love, and taught me how.  Though being heartless is a tool, even so, even now, from time to time.  Such is the way of love, war, life for those who seek what is right.

Time does not fix all things.  My health, for example, has improved only quite modestly.  But how I approach the issues has improved drastically.  If you cannot dynamite the boulder in your path, perhaps you can roll it.  If you cannot do that, perhaps you can find a way over or around it.  With my health boulder, I have learned to do whatever it takes.  At least I am able to live on my own, mostly tend business, enjoy some of what life is about, and even consider other things thought impossible by myself, and currently by medical advisers.  As with physical health, notions of the mind and soul have also come back into alignment.

Even now, some may believe that I have too much pride.  And, in a way, I do.  But the pride is not in myself.  The Truth is something I take great pride with.  Good Faith, honest Love, and a few other things bear the mark of my pride.  Certainly I question some things some hold dear.  Definitely I push the edges and demand, command, more.  From myself, from others, than they think they, or others, can provide.  It is the power of that which bears my pride shining through.  You mistake it if you hate it, or me for it.  It is a choice, one I will not debate.  Argue, if you wish, just understand... that part of it?  You aren't debating me.  But, too, understand, I bow to what gained my pride by proxy through my writing.  I take no grace, other than the grace I need, as a supplicant, away from what is Right.  Still, something to contemplate in parallel, and at times seemingly perpendicular to knowing love again, personally.

The hope, of course, isn't to be king.  That is a, surety, and more of a duty than a delight, dalliance, or wish.  A responsibility.  A reality.  The hope is to return to a place, and time, here, there, and even a step beyond that, when being king is a title given to all men, more truly than any king of earth, but in such a way that order just is, and is not a thing to be maintained.  In such a way, a woman is required.  Not to just be a subject or a helper, but one who shares in that glory.  Royalty herself, and another set of paths over any boulder that might be in the way to the idea of greener pastures beyond.

I am sure that all meant something.  I'll keep pondering as I go about my day.  Later.