Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Is that why they came up with that name in the old Addams Family television series? Of a problem that — over time — becomes a greater issue because it has been left and avoided, leaving the “sore” or other infection to “fester”? The character in the Addams Family series always seemed to pop up and in out of nowhere — like the crazy uncle left locked in the basement whom no one wanted to speak about and everyone wanted to avoid. […]
It is the Roman Stoic, Seneca the Younger, who wrote that, “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable”. It is, in the end, the essence of Stoicism — of living life without complaint and without being impacted by the hardships of the objective world, all the while clinging to a path of virtue unfettered by worldly concerns. […]
The two go hand-in-hand, although we may not necessarily see them as unalterable couplets forever ensconced and inseparable. Instead, we often make choices, then afterwards, express our regrets without having learned from the process of “choice-making”. Choices available are often unanalyzed and nebulous;
We all talk in those terms, don’t we? And when the future is no longer referred to, we begin to worry; for it is the notion of a future that keeps us alive in the present, while the past is merely a portrait of who we were and what made us today. A person without a history is an enigma; of what we are doing presently informs others […]
Say a person says to you, “I was in Japan last night.” You had just seen him the day before, and so you might quickly calculate how many hours it would take for a flight to Japan, how long he could have stayed there and then flown back; and, perhaps you would unduly confuse yourself by thinking, “Perhaps the time-zone shift is such that yesterday is today and today is actually tomorrow’s today because of the international time-zone shift”, […]
It is a contrivance which finds its origins in Greek plays of a civilization now gone; of the recognition of unsolvable problems created by human hubris; and when all seems lost, the “machina” (machine) which lowers the god (the “deus”) onto the stage then resolves everything by supernatural means. […]
Say a person is playing golf, hits the ball badly and yells out loudly, “Fore!” In his mind, however, the individual has the word spelled wrongly — say, as “Four” or “For”, or any number of alternative ways. When first heard, he had thought that it was spelled in the commonplace, conventional way. Does it matter? Doesn’t the fact that homophones exist become an issue of “right” or “wrong” only if the implicit clashes with the explicit? […]
Our first reaction may be that such a phrase is in fact a tautology; for, to make a “mistake” is by definition to do something “stupid”, and so it is merely a redundancy to use and place both terms together. But surely we can conceive of circumstances in which “making a mistake” turns out to be the very opposite of having done something “stupid”? […]
Change is an inevitability in life. Most people, if confronted with it, freely admit that they do not “like” changes. Being static; doing things routinely; living by force of habit; having a “routine” — these provide a sense of comfort. Change, of course, can be a good thing — whether of forced alteration for the good of an individual or circumstance, or voluntarily because a necessary modification was identified, […]
In the annals of history, most of us remain as the inconsequential. Not even a footnote, nor even a passing reference, we are lumped into generations of third-person subjects unnamed and faceless. We might read, for instance, that during the “Sixties” or “Seventies” (or beyond), this group of people or that community […]