Last Updated on July 26, 2016
No, this is not April, and Easter has long passed. Have we done a disservice by admonishing our youth to pursue it? That the worth of a thing is inherently determined by our response to it, and not in the thing itself? If passion is defined by an emotional fervor, barely controllable and unable to be contained, have we set up the wrong criteria by which to live life? Work, vocation, career — are they as fungible as life’s castaways, rejected based upon a momentary or fleeting sense of acceptance or denial?
In Western Classical tradition, the “ordering” of the soul in Plato’s Republic, or the search for balance in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, was always the standard to pursue, and was essentially commensurate with the Eastern approaches of Zen’s denial of the body, the warrior’s acceptance of karma and the fate of life as determined by death; and the circle of life as represented by the Rigvedic deity of fire.
Now, how we feel, the passion one embraces, constitutes the totality of acceptance in a world denounced of living spirits and reduced to materialism and Darwinian determinism of the lowest order. Often, what is lacking is more revealing than the manifestation of a thing; and thus do bifurcated paradigms such as being and nothingness, worth and junk, life and inertness — it is the erasure of one which magnifies the other.
For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who have lost the “passion” for their vocation because of the introduction of a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties as a Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker — the “loss” has a determinate criteria by which to evaluate, and is not merely based upon the lack of an emotional response.
The laws governing Federal Disability Retirement benefits is an employment criteria signed on by the Federal and Postal employee when you became part of the Federal Sector, and it allows for the Federal or Postal employee to apply for, and become eligible to receive, a Federal Disability Retirement annuity when a medical condition arises such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties.
In such circumstances, “loss of passion” may simply be a factual observation; the loss of vocation because of a medical condition is then a further consequence, and preparing, formulating and filing for OPM Disability Retirement benefits, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, becomes a necessary next step upon the consequential abandonment of that passion.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire