Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
As to the familiar saying — of “knowing one’s self” — what can it possibly mean? The saying, “Know thyself”, was inscribed on various temples in Ancient Egypt and was known to be one of the Delphic maxims. Socrates, of course, taught a variation of the statement, contending that the “unexamined life is not worth living” […]
There are people who speak volumes in voluminous volubility, but of thinness of content and lacking of much substance. Then, there is that quiet person in the corner, perhaps distracted by someone’s glancing comment or lost in his own thoughts who, when asked about a topic of general interest to all in a group, articulates in a single sentence what others have attempted to encapsulate in a paragraph, a page, or perhaps a Dickensian novel. […]
Why “straight” as opposed to curved or in a zig-zag manner? Who first thought that it was preferable, desirable, and even “smarter” to “think straight” as opposed to a thought process which involves a greater complexity of circuitous routes? Is the origin based upon a metaphor or an analogy — that, because the shortest distance from Point A to Destination B must by geometric necessity involve a straight line, […]
The telephone-recorded options are the most irritating of all, of course — for, if you hit the wrong one, or fail to remember the correct numeral identified after being offered an endless litany of alternatives, none of which quite fit what you are looking for, then you have to wait until a further option is offered to go back to the general directory in order to once again choose the option offered. […]
That’s a slice of the old stand-up routine, isn’t it? Where the old man is asked about whether this or that hurts, or whether he can feel such-and-such sensation, and he declares, “At my age, I’m lucky to feel anything at all!” Life sensations – it is too general a concept to retain any meaningful applicability. Instead, we are merely satisfied with portions and slices – of a cramp that is rubbed away, […]
Why is it that language is often so far removed from the living of life? Was Wittgenstein correct – that it is a distinct world, separate and apart, that really has nothing to do with the “reality” of an “objective” universe? Was Russell’s cutting quips about the bald King of France a way to point out that the primitive outlook of the traditional correspondence theory of language – that words, concepts, etc. […]
It seems to come and go imperceptibly; we barely notice; then, one day, we wake up and life has passed by; the past is now an elongated prism through which we judge the remainder of our lives; the present is but the despair we feel because of wasted time allowed to blur beyond into a vestige of forgotten winds; and the future remains as the uncertainty we quivered about before we grew up. […]
How is it measured? What constitutes it – a subjective sensation, an objective judgment, or the loosely aligned combination of both? Is it the quantifiable reaction of others, or the measurable amassing of possessions and the value of the gross aggregate? Is the last one atop a proverbial hill of owning stuff what determines and adjudges the success of a person? How does one analyze a life – at what age, in which stage of the slice, and is there a specific point on a pendulum or spectrum, or is it more of a linear continuum where specificity in a point of historical categorization should be resisted in favor of looking at a wider expanse of a ‘period’ evaluation? […]
It is a familiar refrain to note that everyone has a self-contained “private hell”; and an even greater understanding that it is well that such thoughts of other hells are both private, and for the most part, left silent without conveyance or communication. But that is changing, in large part, because people believe that mass dissemination of information has now unleashed any unspoken decorum of dignified discretion. We believe, now, that everyone should “tell all”; that private matters once left as remnants of shameful self-confessions should be publicized because it is healthy for the inner soul to be uncovered. […]
Preparing for life’s vicissitudes can be a daunting task. Some never acquire the skills necessary to accommodate the winds of misdirection; others stumble through like a drunken sailor walking down fate’s gangplank, seeing the end but failing to adapt in time to prevent the calamities forewarned. The very few somehow manage to engage the transformation, like a chameleon who responds to the surrounding environment by becoming invisible within the subtleties of life. […]