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
The Art of Chill evolves over time. It’s a craft I’ve been practicing since birth.
In youth, it’s about taming your anxiety about the future, being okay with not knowing what lies ahead, taking your hits gracefully. It’s remaining poised and relaxed while … Read more...
I wouldn’t say I grew up in a bar…
But there were a few formative years where I spent a lot of time in one.
Fiddler’s Green: a dive bar with an attached restaurant on Center street.
My dad’s best friend was the bartender, so he always sat at the bar and order… Read more...
If I hadn’t stopped scrolling, I wouldn’t have started petting Ziggy.
If I hadn’t pet Ziggy, he never would have put his head in my lap and looked at me with those eyes to take him for a walk.
If I hadn’t gone for a walk, I would not have run into the Italia… Read more...
I agreed to play 30 consecutive games of Castle Mania with Hazel, or “The Troll Game” as we call it. (She had advocated for 50 games but I talked her down.)
Castle Mania is a simple but surprisingly suspenseful card game where you team up with each other to prevent a p… Read more...
It’s one of our favorite things to do: blow off the day and go to Six Flags.
For me, it’s a way to remember I’m alive, that I’m in control of my destiny, and that I value fun, awakedness, and spontaneity more than the other stuff.
For her… well, I̵… Read more...
I got lucky. Or the opposite.
Whatever… I’ve created a mechanism that draws people to me who are in a dilemma and ready for something new.
And they ask me with the passion and wonder of a child shouting to the ocean,
“What should I do?”
What a gift: to be brou… Read more...
I’m a pretty calm dude. I’ve always been this way, but it’s a talent I become more and more proud of as and enter middle age.
Life is hard. Adults have more responsibilities than time, more aspirations than years on a calendar. There’s always a good reason … Read more...
A creative writing professor once told me, “If you’re bored with one of your characters, try giving ’em a beard.” It became a thing. When something was off in one of our stories, he’d slam the paper down and yell out “Give ’em a beard!… Read more...
Epiphanies can be deceiving.
Once we figure out the way – Eureka! I’ve found it! – we tend to disregard all other paths. It feels good for a while but, in the fog of euphoria, we stop looking around. Holding tightly to our compass, we become crotchety.
Simply by t… Read more...
There are good people everywhere.
Better than that.
Everyone is changing,
like the glint of the sun reflected on the ocean:
a thousand slivers of light
wiggling gently
taking shape,
disbanding,
coming back together,
And, each one of us,
A god for all the others.
With the vibrations in our v… Read more...