Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Everything has a price, whether in terms of monetized payments or through labor, effort, worry and loss of peaceful interludes. What expansive periods of our lives do we engage and assign to “wasted” time that must be discarded, forgotten and left beside? What is the price we pay to maintain the status quo, even though we know that such clinging to a lack of change is merely extending the wastefulness of our own making? […]
It is that early morning time when dogs remain still, mice scurry about and the soft snore of distant somber drifts down hallways without traffic of daily discourse. Morning quietude is a slice of a coming day before the tumult of life begins. Modernity possesses a level of activity heretofore untried and unimaginable; the constant barrage of emails, the connectedness that everyone feels pressured to comply with; the fact that we are glued to technology, dependent upon it, […]
Magic is something we cling on to, if only as a last vestige of the light of hope, flickering ever so delicately against the tumultuous winds of a world gone mad. In childhood, it was an imagination enlivened by the pure delight of fairytales, mythologies and rhymes of wands in the single sweep where the golden dust of insurmountable problems […]
It is the lasting image we hold onto. On a warm, sunny day, in the carefree tapestry of a summer month, without cares or worries to haunt or ruminate by; perhaps the gentle sounds of a nearby stream and a cool breeze whispering softly the rustling leaves bright green in their early unravelling, still months away before the harsh August sun turns them into the crinkly brown of late Fall. We dream of those times; perhaps, there never was a moment when life was without difficulties and lying beneath the shade of that big oak tree allowed for smiles of quiet content and soothing moments of careless thoughts. […]
The term is derived from Spanish origins, and it is that characteristic which contributed most to the rise of Hemingway’s fame, and his ultimate act of self-destruction. Of bullfights, big-game hunting, reporting amidst the Spanish Civil War, leaving unmentioned his encounter with death and devastation from his experiences in World War I, resulting in the Phoenix rising through his unforgettable fictional characters, Howard Krebs and Nick Adams, whose souls have been damaged beneath the surface of any physical manifestation of wounds or injuries, where reconnection with society, its rhythms of daily living and silliness of interests, can no longer be possible — these comprise the defining events of the meaning of the word itself. […]