Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
A self-less, feel-good blog about love, life, and work by career coach and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
I stole candy from little kids on Halloween.
This is one of my worst moments.
Those who know me, those who have a collection of great Cliff moments, will forgive me. They will cover this faded fragment with the glitter of my good-doings.
Those who don’t know me, well, they hav… Read more...
I have a dream.
All the greats said that.
I think dreams get a bad rap. They’re usually portrayed as wispy clouds in the sky, nothing you can hold onto, a thing to revere from a distance.
But don’t be fooled by the floating. If you examine a cloud closely, you’ll s… Read more...
When I’m excited about something, I make machine-gun noises with my mouth. If I’m really stoked, I’ll cup my hands to my mouth to make the noise louder, and then move my head from side to side in a sweeping motion as if I’m spraying the room with machine-g… Read more...
All the light in the world and it’s never enough.
The sun, as generous as it is, must also cast shadows as long as there are things to illuminate.
Here’s the problem: sometimes we feel the coolness of the shadows more often than the heat of the sun. Not by choice, of co… 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...
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...
I put a dark blue sticky tab on the edge of my desk – not a full-on Post It, the kind of transparent tab you use to bookmark a textbook. I put it there because I was measuring the length of my carryon bag to make sure it fits the very specific parameters of the airline. It … Read more...
When you’re struggling to finish something you’ve been obsessing over for a while, sometimes the best thing to do is to give up.
I often discover the thing I’m looking for, on the way to the shower, sitting on the toilet, in the midst of sweeping the sidewalk, in… Read more...
Sometimes I feel lonely, not the loneliness that comes with accrued time in solitude but the deeper singularity of realizing that, mathematically speaking, there’s no one like me out there.
This is not meant to be sad.
With the complexity and randomness of genetics, combined … Read more...
Six people, including me, in a matter of minutes, disintegrate into selfish pettiness…
The woman in the “15 Items or Less” checkout lane with well over 20 items piles her tower of cans onto the tiny conveyor belt, careful not to look back at us.
The checkout clerk… Read more...