Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Sometimes, it may be a true statement; at others, it may merely turn out to be a throwaway line that is cast about to deceive a decoy into the mix. What is the objective criteria in determining the truth of the statement? If a young lad is failing in school and the parents contemplate some form of incentivized punishment, […]
We have all enjoyed playing the game – of the silent act in order for our team to come up with the name of the book, a famous saying, identification of a country or place; and with some inebriation as a helpful assistant to even greater pathways of outrageous laughter, the game is enjoyed in homes and neighborhoods when gatherings aggregate in times of holidays or special occasions. […]
It is something that we leave behind. Yet, unlike a wallet, a watch, a piece of jewelry or a troublesome child better left forgotten, we don’t have an opportunity to go back and get it. We say of that laundry list, “Oh, I need to go back and get it” (except maybe of the last in the list, whom we hope will be adopted into a kindly family and simultaneously also leave the parents behind); but not of the legacy. No one ever says of that, “Oh, I left my legacy behind, and I need to go back and get it.” Instead, it is intimately bound up with mortality, […]
We like to think that life is represented by a linear curve of upward progression; in reality, most of us reach an apex, then remain static and content in the late summer years of our lives. There is nothing wrong with such a state of affairs; as contentment and comfort embrace a spectrum of stability, so the refusal of change and resistance to vicissitude are not indicators of laziness, as once thought in former days of youth where transition, sacrifice and relinquishment of stability were necessary for purposes of future advancement. Most of us, within a defined minefield of progress and regress, remain within an invisible glass casing of immobility. […]
Most people prefer anonymity; although, in more recent years, the hunt for one’s five minutes of fame by “hook or by crook”, whether to impose, intrude, push through, etc., and wave in front of a camera, or to perform some demeaning act to attract a byline in the Guinness Book of Records, has become a prevalence beyond mere happenstance exception […]
Life brings about natural “stages” — paralleling certain age requirements, with subsets and parenthetical footnotes as to each. As the queried riddle posed by the Sphinx (“What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening, and no legs at night?”) brings about clarity of identity, so the stages of life provide a glimpse into the inherent complexity of man’s psyche. […]