Last Updated on December 23, 2022
How often is there a cry to be “left alone”? By how many people, in what quantifiable slice of life and order of living despite obligations and responsibilities that may be abandoned, do we embrace those periods of remorseless solitude?
We are commanded to be “social animals”, by way of anthropologists who devise intricate paradigms of cultural historicity and ancestral heritage from mere fossils of partial bone fragments; via condemnation by psychologists who warn of the danger of those who are “loners” and become lost in the deviation of secluded thoughts and fantasies of vengeful imaginations; and by Mom and Dad who worry that the teenager who locks the door and surfs the enticements of the Internet undermines the very fabric of societal cohesion, and allows for deviancy to determine the dice of droll durations.
And so the guilt resides with a negation; for, when we do not interact, socialize and remain in the company of others, we are considered as rogues, antisocial occultists who harbor resentments like hermits who climb into caverns of caustic catacombs to care only of remorseless solitude.
Yet, in this din of modernity, where the endless cacophony of drumbeats, raised voices and electronic media bombardment ceaselessly invading, interrupting and interceding, where has the delicacy of inviolable solitude gone to? At what point does self-reflection, thought, the play writer’s “aside” and the soliloquy that contemplates the role of one’s self in the expansive universe become a self-possessing journey of mere selfish egoism?
Instead, we allow that being constantly “connected” with one another – through social media, Texting, Facebook, Instagram, Skyping and all of the other multitudinous methodologies of electronic communication and “connectivity” have become normalized, such that that which used to be a productive use of the proverbial “down time” – enjoying the remorseless solitude by writing, or reading, or just reflecting — is now considered strange and dangerous, while its opposite – of becoming obsessed with the persistent din of socialized life – is considered the normative ordinariness of daily living.
Remorseless solitude is the delicious walk in the woods alone; of meditating upon the quietude of a morning’s red dawn; and of communing with nature, whether in one’s backyard or in the outbacks of nature’s delight.
For Federal Gov. employees and U.S. Postal workers who are forced and compelled into a status of remorseless solitude – not by choice, but by reason of a medical condition which targets the Federal or Postal employee into being “that person” who is considered the outcast, almost as if diagnosed with leprosy or some other horrible communicable disease – the isolation and separation by being identified with a person with a disability will have its negative effects.
Preparing, formulating and filing a OPM Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, will not make things at the Federal agency or the Postal facility any better, until an approval is received from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Then, once the Federal or Postal employee becomes a Federal Disability Retiree, perhaps you can enjoy that period of remorseless solitude that previously had been involuntarily imposed upon you by casting you as that deviant occultist no longer part of the mythical “team”.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire
Federal Employee Disability Attorney