OPM Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: That uncluttered mind

How do we remain so in this world of cacophonous and discordant barrage of sounds, images and the overload of information?  Is it even possible to remain as the quietude of mind within the meditative spirit of a Zen monk reflecting upon the pool of uncertainty yet contemplating the serenity of a mind’s eye?  The cluttering is deafening; and, with it, the anxiety, stresses and paralyzing fears that accompany the world writ so large and looming so fearsome.  The uncluttered mind is the one that, with singular focus, yet accomplishes goals in life, […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Giving lip service

What does it mean to merely give “lip service”?  Ultimately, it is the hypocrisy of committing to words the sincerity of inaction.  In other words, it is merely the utterance of words, with nothing to follow.  This is a society that speaks much, and does little.  We give lip service to the braggadocio of being a productive society, yet, […] Read More …

FERS CSRS Disability Retirement from OPM: Fatal Flaws

Nature is harsher than the artifices created by man; egalitarianism or empathy for the less fortunate, are not found as traces of widespread encapsulation of the essence of the wild; instead, the opposite is true: of indifference, abandonment in the face of a wounded comrade, and flight as opposed to commonality of surrender. It is only in the antiseptic universe of human civilization that we discover character, trust and fortitude in the face of threat. Is this a fatal flaw in the humanity of the species? Perhaps. Time will tell, as civilizations rise and fall, as to whether the inherent weakness of totalitarianism […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Pause

It is an act which involves non-action, and results from the character trait of caution. As an identified activity of inert behavior, it is telling that the concept is recognized as a contrast to its linguistic cousin, like the coupling of “being and nothingness”, or of “love and hate”, as if the mercurial combination is a natural outflowing of innate necessity. Not quite the punctuation of finality in a period, nor the elongated independence of a semicolon; yet, the pause is marked by a comma, that grammatical eavesdropping left like a careless crumb on the way to a destination not quite directed, yet motivated by hesitant steps of trepidation. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Loss of that subtle distinction — fun versus training

Reading older works of literature is a lesson in historical perspective; times were different, and not just slightly, but by leaps and bounds. The linear nature of lives results in the incremental adaptation by evolutionary subtlety; that was precisely Darwin’s argument — that the metamorphosis reacting to physiological necessity in order to allow for the propagation of any given species, occurs not by genetic alterations involving sudden and drastic earthquakes, but by slow, almost undetectable nuances of change. […] Read More …