Last Updated on November 21, 2015
We tend to personify and project upon lifeless, inorganic and inert entities, not to mention the extrapolation of generalized and universal conceptual forms, and inject them with personalities, characteristics and living imprints. Did Plato make this fatal mistake, or was he beyond our intellectual capacity, and perhaps like the mischievous character he provided in his dialogues, was he merely the siamese twin of Socrates and inextricably conjoined in body, mind and philosophical spirit, with that glint of the knowing jokester?
“Life”, as we like to make of the stuff which confounds us, is like the half-crazed homeless person who stands on the street corner and yells at us as we pass by. Sometimes, we even get hit by a bombardment of spittle, and an unexpected whack on the head, leaving us stunned and helpless, faint with outrage and anxious that Mr. Life may follow us home. And, indeed, he sometimes does.
Life is like that fathomless diatribe; and we are merely an audience of one, isolated, watchful, spectators who can only observe, sometimes shout back, and in a feeble attempt at altering destiny, weep in a heap of self-pity and trembling repose. That is how the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker feels, in confronting the mammoth of the Federal Bureaucracy and the U.S. Postal Service, especially when the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker are enmeshed in the weakened state of fighting a 3-front battle: One’s own Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service; a medical condition that has begun to impact the ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional requirements; and the battle against “life” and all of its multitudinous facets of complexities.
Is “life” just another metaphorical voice in the darkness of time? For the Federal or Postal worker, the time to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, must often be determined by the harkening voice of life’s trials and travails. As OPM is just another behemoth to confront, in addition to one’s own agency or the U.S. Postal Service, so the preparation to “do battle” must include the tools of engagement: the facts, the law, and the will to proceed. And like life’s fathomless diatribe, the will to win must first and foremost be the amour of protection in preparing, formulating and filing for OPM Disability Retirement.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire