Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
We set them for a reason: To prevent future conflicts; to establish clearly when trespasses occur; to allow for the maintenance of compartmentalization in order to preempt overlapping potential conflicts; to teach societal conventions in a safe, artificial context; to demarcate the lines of acceptable behavior, etc. […]
The former provides the form; the latter, the character of the entity. It is the duality in combination which creates the ability to identify the particular being in an Aristotelian manner — as opposed to the more generalized definition of “Being”. Without the largest organ of the human body — one’s skin — the “content” of that which separably identifies one individual from another would be lost, and we would all be mere aggregations of various organs not necessarily organized in any coherent way. […]
Why is it that confessions and public domains represent a relief of sorts, an expiation of self-contained guilt and a sense of “righting” a wrong? In Catholicism, confession holds a prominent place in the liturgy of that which constitutes a faithful observant; in crime novels, the taunting serial criminal is said to subconsciously “want” to confess to the crime, and leave multiple fingerprints at the scene of each devastating incident in an effort to provide a trail of enough clues to ultimately lead to his or her arrest, […]
It is the linear manner in which we perceive the world; of straight lines as opposed to circular figures; of two points or perhaps three, then again lines of intersection and connecting the dots, instead of arcs that waver and detour beyond the directional certainty of point A to Point B and beyond. […]
If all negative words were expunged from the universe, would we hold only positive thoughts? Or, is there an inherent, innate need to recognize and state the negative, regardless? If you are sitting in your office and a lion walks in, pounces upon your least-favorite supervisor and devours him whole, do you turn to your colleague and calmly say, “He lived a very good life.” For, in such a universe, expunging the negative has been already accomplished, and such statements as, “Oh, what a horrible thing to have happened!” is no longer allowable, and the law has forbidden such discourse of linguistic negativity. Is it possible? […]
Is the substance we expunge necessarily the opposite of the positive? Does the mere fact of expiation denote that which is unwanted, or merely no longer of utility? In ancient times, an elixir was considered to be a substance of great desirability; it possessed multiple meanings, including a reference to that substance which was used in alchemy to alter base-metals into the gleaming riches of the natural order found deep beneath the chasms of the earth – gold. […]
It is rare for the individual to accept constructive criticism; rarer still, to invite and welcome it in any form, whether destructive, constructive or otherwise characterized as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”. The fact is that few of us accept any form of it at all, and quickly respond with the rebuttal: “It’s not constructive”. But why does it need to be? […]
Much of life is spent in retrospectively justifying actions; the remainder of the time, of making excuses where we can, and when we need to (which is often). The great thing about excuses is that the reserve of them can never be depleted; like the never-exhaustive stars in the universe, we can always discover, make up, or otherwise concoct another. Thus, to counter that a person has “run out of excuses” is to defy reality; we can always, if the need requires, go back to one that we long ago abandoned, and stick to it. […]
Goals define an aspect of humanity that differentiates from the beast; just look at nature and the existential encounter with the “now” at all times. Animals besides Man look at the world around and respond appropriately and accordingly. For them, the future is the now; the past is merely a basis upon which to react in this moment of time; and what the appetitive parts of the soul require, the predator attempts to satisfy. Goals, on the other hand, project into the future. […]
We begin the nascent origins of remembrances expecting greater things beyond the normal levels of reality; that is what we now define as a “good childhood” as opposed to a lesser, or even an ordinary one to bear and be burdened with. We are admonished that we can “be anything”; […]