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
A global pandemic is as big as it gets.
Bigger than a tectonic shift (an earthquake only affects a city or two).
Bigger than landing on the moon. (Only a few competing nations care about that.) Bigger than a political scandal, a stock market crash, and the fall of an empire.
The who… Read more...
A friend of mine said it and we both became small:
We are a species.
Yes, like a Songbird or a grove of great Oaks.
Homo Sapiens:
Upright, even-toothed descendants of the other species that didn’t make it, one of the most pervasive, diverse, and dominant species in existence, o… Read more...
My Psychology teacher ignored the beginning and endings of chapters when he was lecturing. As soon as he finished preaching Chapter 1, he’d move right into Chapter 2, even if there were just 5 minutes left of class.
“What?!” he’d reply, with fake incredulou… Read more...
Accomplishments are food for us humans.
That’s why we cheer out loud when a baby walks or when our friend crosses the finish line. It’s why we pass around videos of special needs adults beating their best time on a treadmill.
We do it for them but we also do it for us. … Read more...
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...
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...
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...