Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
It is the precursor to the punch line, or perhaps the conclusion of a tale told with eyes wide with anticipation; what precedes, what follows, and then…. Stories are told well, middling, or perhaps badly, but they are told nonetheless, with conclusions that come about with surprise, aplomb or perhaps with a suspended yawn stifled for mere courtesy. […]
They are the projects of life of which Heidegger recognizes, allowing for avoiding the inevitabilities of life’s challenges; of fate, mortality, future insecurity, and death. What quantifiable slice of one’s life is governed by distractions? Must it always be less than 50% in order to remain so, and if it exceeds that halfway point, does it then become something substantive and not merely the peripheral meaning of what it means to “be distracted”? If a distraction is considered to be an aside – that which waylays a person’s attention by focusing upon […]
Even in this age of millennial ignorance of ancients, literary or biblical references to arcane metaphors (while taking delight in such useless information as the minutiae of Sanskrit grammar), the general view that King Solomon’s judgment was profoundly wise, is accepted without argument. Yet, were his assumptions correct, and do they apply today? Is it presumptively reasonable that love of child would rise above the other emotions felt – of jealousy, perhaps, or envy of the other mother – and declare the truth of the hidden motive? Is there a priority or order of sequence that necessarily mandates truth to manifest itself, when the choice is one of death, loss, sacrifice and the horror of splitting a baby into two? […]
There is that moment of haziness, where sleep has not yet overtaken and consciousness has not yet been fully lost, where the philosophical abyss of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or stands in relation to knowledge, truth, insight and puzzlement, and where questions abound concerning the relationship between words and the objective reality of constellations clashing amidst bursting stars and black holes. Sleep is a realm sought after; restorative sleep, a state of being which, without explanation or cause, we accept as a necessity of life’s conundrums. […]
There are those we sometimes meet in life where the infectiousness of enthusiasm cannot be avoided. Whether such active energy can be truly sustained, to what extent, and for how long; and, whether such enthusiasm is matched within the essence of the being behind the veil of smiles and outward appearances, only the heart and soul knows in the privacy of one’s chambers. Whether an artifice for show and appearances, or a true bundle of vitality, the reality of such people and their existence is besides the point; rather, the real issue to consider is the contrasting starkness which is revealed when encountering such people. […]
From early childhood, the necessity of imposing constraints and conformity produces the positive effect of a well-ordered society. But corollary and unforeseen consequences often occur, as in the quashing of creativity and mindsets which step outside of the proverbial “box”. […]