Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
There are mistakes; then, there is the compounding one where we fail to identify X for what it is, and continue to make excuses by deflecting with Y, excusing with Z or replacing it with XX. This is called the “festering mistake” – that mistake which, like a wound that could easily have been attended to, is allowed to become infected, then spread, then become so serious as to require further and drastic means to save a life. […]
They all constitute the arena of “make-believe”. Yet, we excuse the first, ignore the second, and feel guilt and shame for embracing the third – or, at least some of us, do. Of fairytales, we share in the delight of passing on such tall tales of wonderlands and Eskimo nights full of shooting stars and talking Polar Bears; of mythologies, we recognize the need for lost civilizations to have embraced a means of explaining, but consider such trifles to be beyond the sophistication of modernity, and arrogantly dismiss such dusty irrelevancies as mere fodder for a fairytale told: […]
We all do it, to one extent or another; doctors who deal with terminal children or relegated to the emergency floors; patients who must see the foreboding grief in the eyes of family members who have been told; psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who listen “objectively” to the turmoil and trauma of other lives; the capacity for human compartmentalism is nearly inexhaustible. Does the horse who listens to the cab driver in the brilliant short story, “Misery” (or often subtitled as, “Grief” or “To whom shall I tell my grief?”) […]
We have all built them as children; those shantytown assemblages like the poverty-stricken and make-shift huts constructed by corrugated debris gathered from refuse and discarded materials, flimsy and ready to collapse, if not by architectural fault lines, then certainly from the sudden and malicious puff of air emitted by one’s younger brother or sister tiptoeing up from behind in a sneak attack. The House of Cards — they test the dexterity and patience of one’s character, and simultaneously represent anything built on a precarious foundation, including business ventures, family relationships, and of life itself. […]
It is the personal encounter, the direct engagement, that many seek to actualize in hopes of fulfillment. “If only I could speak to the person”; “If you knew the real me”; and, indeed, it is that depersonalized universe which undermines and tempers. Somehow, if we are merely one among many, like the little girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List, the singularity of the living entity shouts at us for relevance, significance, and a chance to distinguish. It is in the personalization of the deep chasm reaching down from the inertia of life, from which the sacred emerges. […]