Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
It is what we want to maintain, whether on a tightrope, a ledge high above in an apartment complex, or just walking from the living room to the kitchen. For, without it, the silent agreement we have made with the objective world would suddenly topple, and we would be lying horizontally and seeing the world from the ground up, as opposed to the vertical manner in which we ambulate, and observing the world from above. […]
There can be a duality of meanings, of course — of doing X “out of love” or “being” out of love. The two are opposites, or of conceptual antonyms. What does it mean to act “out of love” — in the first sense of the phrase? Does being compensated for doing something necessarily and immediately cancel any notion that one is doing it with the pure motive “out of love”? […]
They are the connections by which a society maintains a fabric of commonality, whether by myths, narrations of stories handed down, religious knowledge or books and movies. It used to be that the “Good Book” was the mainstay of the reference points, so that when a person referred to having “eaten the apple”, for a simple example, one immediately knew that the reference points between a sin committed […]
It is a procedural approach, and those who engage in it often have the greater talents akin to science, engineering, mathematics and symbolic logic. It is the person who views every contingency in terms of best and worse case scenarios before deciding upon a determined course of action. But how accurate is the “best” and the “worst”? […]
Does history alter significance of incidents as time heals or otherwise events are forgotten? Does the perspective of the one directly (or even indirectly) impacted make a difference upon the writing of history, or is it as some cynics have countered – that history is the written narrative of the victors, and everyone else is merely annotated as mere footnotes, if at all? […]
What happened to them? Where did those once youthful and exuberant conduits taking us beyond the monotony of the present disappear to? When did we allow for “practicality” and “being real”, of “growing up” and “becoming responsible” to usurp the dreams of our youth? Did we misjudge, misunderstand and misapply the principles first taught, and confuse the two concepts – of having a “realistic viewpoint” and abandoning all dreams and hopeful fantasies? […]
There are certain phrases that turn one’s attention, and daydreams of exotic lands and foreign places become projected onto one’s imagination, like camels, Arabian nights and sand dunes in faraway corners. But, then, reality imposes itself; such places probably exist a few miles hence; those distant lands are now war-torn and deemed by the State Department to be forbidden avenues for sightseers and tourists in cut-off shorts and Hawaiian Shirts (did you know that the latter are apparently “back in style” – as if they ever were?), with warnings and cautionary predictions where officialdom has already evacuated the premises. […]