Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
We all try and do it. Somehow, pride’s fall and the fool’s failure arrives by way of the solitary figure trying to go it alone. Friendship never had a chance, and the neighbor’s mended fences never allowed for any conversation of depth beyond the wave of the hand or the occasional “hello, how are you” — punctuated by a quick about-face and racing with terror into the sanctuary of one’s home. […]
Sometimes, it may be a true statement; at others, it may merely turn out to be a throwaway line that is cast about to deceive a decoy into the mix. What is the objective criteria in determining the truth of the statement? If a young lad is failing in school and the parents contemplate some form of incentivized punishment, […]
Is sadness relative? Are there sad stories that are so sad that even the ones that were considered sad prior to the sadder story being told, somehow nullify the lesser sad stories and make them into not sad stories? Do we, after hearing the sadder tale, turn to the first story teller and say, “Yours was not so sad, after all, and in fact you have it pretty good”? If a person tells of having just buried his mother, and you ask, “How old was she?” […]
The problem is often the perspective, and not the reality. Somehow, human beings walk about this earth with the expectation that fulfillment is in the “now” and development is merely something ascribed to babies, yogurt and African nations on a far away continent of timeless immaturity. Potentiality; the consistency of growth; and, even in old age, despite the deterioration and degeneration of cellular expansion, our lives represent an inchoate and rudimentary structure such that we have to constantly strive to grow. […]
The locus of one’s soul has been much debated throughout the history of Philosophy; Descartes, of course, took the incommodious step of actually identifying the central point, but left some “wiggle room” by declaring it merely as the “principal seat of the soul” (is there a secondary, back-seat area for the soul, as well?), but of course, the French can be excused for such seemingly drunken issuances of localities, when belief in supposedly impenetrable defenses can provide for a mirage of security. […]
If you ascribe something to everything, then nothingness results. For, to declare that all of X is contained in Y is to delete X into irrelevancy, and leave Y with nothing but X, thereby subsuming everything with nothing. Thus, when we argue for a form of pantheism, the language of “all” tends to diminish the uniqueness of singularity, and the meanings of distinction and difference. […]