Last Updated on April 13, 2017
Don’t you hate those “Apps” that reveal how much time you have taken to engage Activity-X or mindless-video-game-Y?
To engage in an aside for pure enjoyment’s sake is to get lost in the moment of leisure, to become engrossed and without a mind to time, problems of the world, circumstances of the present or the irrelevancy of one’s own station in life. To read a book – perhaps of no great consequence, neither a “classic” nor a best seller of sorts; to push buttons in responding to a mindless video game; to have a silly electronic conversation with a spouse, a friend, a daughter or son aside from the seriousness of wisdom, guiding principles and life’s meaning couched in pointless meanderings without a compass of direction; and then we look down and realize that the cumulative duration expended has taken up a greater slice of our lives.
Now, that is irritating. Yet, we cannot always and forever discipline ourselves to engage in the strict teleological essence of that which we are called to do or be. Perhaps, in some former times when leisure was not yet an invented necessity, where finding basic necessities on a daily basis meant survival for that day or perishing in the pangs of growing hunger; or when our moments were occupied in service to a tyrant, a Lord or the King or Queen, whose very displeased nod could mean taking away one’s freedom and being banished into the dungeons of a rat-infested abyss where typhoid and other excrements of human dystopia ran rampaging through the horrors of a powerless populace; and of those times, people could with singular focus engage the toil of monotonous service without any mirth or joy but for a drunken state of euphoria here and there.
Do durations of time noted, in their aggregate, mean anything in the end? If we have “wasted” such-and-such hours, or perhaps days and weeks that amount to a full year at the end of one’s life, does that mean that we have failed in our need to reach, to accomplish and complete the lifelong project of – what? How many unmarked graves evidencing lives unrepentant for time wasted will be remembered for projects not completed? We wait upon life, and life rewards by giving back silence. We now have algorithms to show ourselves the extent of our wasted activities, and believe that we can improve ourselves by pointing out that which we stare at in wasting further time being anxious over noted durations that stand time still within the conscience of our own making.
For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who know the feeling of “waiting”, and have realized that noted durations mean that time has come to a standstill because of a chronic medical condition that simply will not go away, it may be time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.
Time does, indeed, stand still, and noted durations serve to reveal to us that time wasted is time never recovered, and remaining in a constant state of fear because the medical condition has “angered” or otherwise irritated members of that “team” you once served in your former and healthy capacity, will never get “better” by staying put. Noted durations are for those who want to remain in a perpetual state of inactivity, and for the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who needs to move onward to the next stage of life, such noted durations only serve to hold us back from throwing off the shackles of conventional and normative lives that whisper not the brightness of tomorrow’s future.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire