Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
An insightful, feel-good blog about work, life, and the elusive balance between the two, by career counselor, award-winning resume writer, and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
We’re all in need of the same thing:
Acceptance.
In love, at work, with family, with friends, in the presence of God. We’re hoping our jagged little pieces will make sense to someone else, that they’ll fit into something important and prove our life’s work w… Read more...
I’ve been yelling at the podium a lot lately.
It’s the school board. I scratched a little hole, looked through, and what I saw was too ugly to walk away from. The people around me, the community, a lot of them see it too and now we’re all standing in the mud, tea… Read more...
No one wants to be in this place but we all sort of end up here – in the hole. All of the books, all of the rituals, all of the practice, they can’t protect us absolutely.
This rule of gravity, this inevitability of falling back down no matter how high you’ve bee… Read more...
A moth at my window tries desperately to get inside. He’s attracted to the glowing, white screen of my monitor, a sharp contrast to the blackness of 5am.
In haste, it scrambles into the stringy membranes of a spider web in the corner of the window. The spider wastes no time,… Read more...
In the movie Goonies, a group of subterranean adolescent adventurers revel in the fact that they made it farther than the legendary treasure hunter and riddle solver, Chester Copperpot.
They had less experience and less training than the Great Mr. Copperpot; afterall, they’r… Read more...
I think we like having enemies.
It’s an unfortunate trait that’s carried over from the primitive days of survival, a tribal necessity: we band together to win.
Bonding is a biproduct of two people pushing against a third. It’s the cheap way to reach love, the pave… Read more...
I had some time so I decided to go to one of my favorite restaurants and get dinner and a drink while reading my book.
Approaching the restaurant, I could tell something was off. The door was open but the place was empty and the owner was yelling.
Walking through the door, I saw he… Read more...
The greatest thing you can do upon meeting someone new is to recognize that you do not know them.
What you see, how you feel… these things will mislead you. We are manipulated by patterns and repetition. Once we see 5 trees grow to the same height with the same fruit, we sta… Read more...
There I am, as new as the sun coming up over the edge of the earth, reflecting on the magnificence of the river.
Ignoring time, I instinctively jump into the river and let the current take me, it doesn’t matter where I go and I don’t care that I left my shoes behind. I… Read more...
It is difficult to make decisions when you’re holding up the world with both hands, and that’s often how we feel – with our jobs and our families – like we, alone, are holding everything together.
That’s why we let it go on for too long. Because it… Read more...