Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
A denial from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management of a Federal Disability Retirement application is disappointing enough. For, after waiting for countless and seemingly endless months, exhausting one’s resources and relying upon the reality of one’s medical conditions and limitations thereby imposed in persuading OPM to draw […]
We all have a threshold of tolerance; it is, in the end, a spectrum and a range which cannot be generalized. The MRI that reveals degenerated tissue or organic dysfunctioning may parallel the pain experienced, but it does not determine the level of tolerance for any given individual. Yet, while thresholds may vary, there is a limit to human toleration, and the question for each individual is: […]
Of course what not to say is as important as the things one says. Such a warning is true in most contexts — social; professional; personal; familial; in either private or public settings. We are taught that at an early age, and continue to feel its social and cultural “bite” throughout adulthood, until one has (hopefully) gained some wisdom throughout the years. […]
Have you ever engaged in lengthy ruminations, procrastinating because of fear, trepidation and cautionary constraints before proceeding, only to find in retrospect that there was really nothing – or, at least, not much – to have worried about? Often, it is the greater monsters within that become compounded, exaggerated and increased in fearsome proportions beyond the reality of the objective world, in parallelism with the anxiety we release and the angst we allow. Within the insular world of our language games […]
Is it just? And of the query, what meaning do we ascribe to it? Of one formulation, an implied addendum unspoken – as in, “Is life just about going through the motions, or is there more to it than that?” In another manner of meaning, it can encapsulate the greater paradigms of fairness, balance and equality of opportunity: the ‘just’ is merely an abbreviation of the greater concept of ‘Justice‘ with a capital J. Or, perhaps the duality of meanings is intended – for, in the former manner of speaking, is there not an implicit denotation that the wider connotation is inferred […]
Despite evidence to the contrary, we tend to live life expecting disaster just around the next corner; and when it does happen, of course, it only confirms the greatest fears which we had anticipated all along. Whether any singular calamity is merely a magnification of our expectation of life’s fragile coordinates of unfairness, or simply a reflection of truth in an objectively impassive and uncaring world, it is our sense of destiny left to the fates of gods who care not and submission to the evolutionary Darwinism of predatory-to-prey beliefs which obviates any residual joy of life. Then, when a wrong turn is made, we shake our heads knowingly and whisper in a soliloquy of wisdom unconstrained, […]