Hank Worden played Moses Harper as the irritating sidekick alongside John Wayne in The Searchers. At the end, he merely wanted a rocking chair to sit in, and rock the days and dusks away in view of the landscape’s beauty which told the story of the human narrative: of struggle, life and death; of wars and massacres; of the history of human inhumanity.
Perhaps that was his idea of a slice of paradise. Everyone possesses a concept of it; for some, it is simple and fundamental; for others, complex and encapsulating endless greed. Maybe it is just a place of your own on a mountaintop; a house in a quiet neighborhood; a family, or not; or a multi-million dollar mansion with wide and endless swaths of acreage.
Whatever constitutes one’s idea of a slice of paradise, that is what we live for. For some, also, it is the negation of something. We take for granted our health, and when we lose it, our idea of a slice of paradise is altered profoundly: For those in chronic pain, it is the negation or lessening of that pain; for those with anxieties and panic attacks and depression, just to get through the day without a breakdown.
For Federal employees and Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing all of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application under FERS may come closest to a realistic conception of a slice of paradise: For an opportunity to have some respite from the daily stresses of the workplace and attend to the priorities which envelope one’s daily life — the medical condition itself, which reveals that the fall of Adam and Eve, indeed, sliced paradise forever and a day.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Lawyer
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 