Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
It may seem like a minor thing, but such seemingly insignificant knowledge often represents a metaphor for greater and more relevant factors. What happened the previous day can set the tone of how the next, succeeding day will turn out. There is, in life, a repetition and rhythm that is fairly predictable; and when that monotony […]
Can the precipice of elation last for long? What of contentment — a seemingly “lower-level” joy that pervades and remains for the duration of a season? Does evidence of its durability depend upon a smile frozen upon one’s face, or can it continue to establish its existence with gleaming eyes and a perpetual grin that seems never to go away? […]
We have all experienced the psychology of the cursed “waiting room” — that place which is assigned as the “intermediate” lull, like purgatory for the virtuous-to-be, where they think that by making you believe that you have now been chosen to wait in a separately sequestered area, your patience will become refreshed and you will allow for another lengthy wait. The psychologists have it all figured out, don’t they? […]
Of course, the one that always pops up in one’s mind is the most ignoble of them all, with the image from the movies depicted over and over: Of a blond-haired, straggly and wild-eyed man with a mustache of extravagant vintage taking a desperate last stand against the charging Indians. Custer’s last stand somehow reverberates throughout the mythology of the American West, even though folly is mistakenly replaced by some view of courage or other laudable character traits. […]
What does the concept even mean? When we guide the child with such a statement, we are asking that the formative years of impulsive reactivity pause for a moment to try a different approach. “Think it through” – is an admonition to figure out the tangled web of problems by applying a sequential, logical methodology where frustration should not impede, and when patience becomes the friend of success. “Thinking it through” is a reminder that there is indeed a solution, […]
There are gargoyles we imagine, which are scarier than those in real life – unless we mean by them the ones who plan to do us harm (and not just murderers, rapists and other violators of the social contract scheme). For the latter, we have laws, self-defensive mechanisms, and the ultimate justification for flight, and sometimes they work, at others, partially or not at all. We can spend a lifetime fretting over the monsters without; it is those within – the former that haunts and never leaves the home of the mind – that destroy without a finger lifted. For, in the end, it is fear that defeats, and that is well known by students of military strategy. […]
In human history, class structure — whether of bloodlines or lineage; of wealth or claim to title and royalty; or of validated descendants from ancestral superiority — has been the norm. Then, along came a religious figure (unnamed herein to avoid risk of inflammatory offense and preventing the potential for implosions of alarming hashtags in fits of fear and panic) who posited the notion that the “poor” (that class of mass populace which comprises the greater part of the world) should take “pity” upon the “rich” (those in the minority of the greater class struggle who control and manipulate the invisible levers of the world) […]