“I feel your pain” has become a declaration of empathetic character in modernity; but whether born of sincerity or from political expediency, one can never know, precisely because empathy […]
It is always a challenge to persuade someone that an X exists despite its subjective nature, despite the lack of visual verification. This is a visual-centered world, and while blindness can be compensated to a certain degree by assistive technology, […]
For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are considering filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, under FERS, the image which must be considered is the following: There is a wall. […]
The cave paintings in Lascaux are apparently a stunning display of prehistoric art created by Paleolithic Man some 17000 years ago — well before Christ, before the Roman or Greek civilizations; before the written word. […]
It is one thing to experience pain; quite another, to convey that onto paper. The fiction writer struggles with writer’s block; the ordinary individual (if there is such an entity), the problem is more of self-deception. Because one experiences X, one presumes that others can relate to X as a fellow human being. […]
It is that which we strive to achieve; a moment of quietude, an aside of reserved inattention; that plateau where sheep graze silently in pastures green, and the distant echo of a neighbor’s dog barking is merely but a contour from the daily hubbub of reality. Perhaps the pastoral setting is but an idealized paradigm; but, without it, there is a sense that life is pointless. We may engage in daily meanderings and wonder about teleological issues on high; but, in the end, something more mundane is the normative constriction which compels us to act. […]
Other than the obvious alliteration of the two concepts, they are antonyms defined by the reality of sensations. On a spectrum, each can reach differing measures of identification and tolerance: pain can vary in degree of severity and tolerance, based upon an individual’s […]
Wittgenstein was a master of linguistic analysis, and questioned the traditional correspondence theory between the language which we speak and describe about the world, and the objective reality which we encounter on a daily basis. He was the penultimate […]
Pain is a reminder that the physiological state of one’s body is in need of rest or repair; it is tantamount to an error message on the computer, with the analogy of our brain being the software component. Chronic pain thus constitutes a system shutdown; continued […]
The problem with pain is that, quite simply put, there is only one person who “owns” it — the pain-feeler. One can describe it, ascribe adjectives which somewhat make it come alive for the listener; and even attempt metaphors and analogies that expand upon the limited […]
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 