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
Since roller coasters aren’t an option anymore due to my proclivity for dizziness (sob), I went to the water park with my daughter, instead.
We hit the Big Kahuna, The Typhoon Lagoon, and the wave pool.
But it was 70 degrees, not nearly warm enough for a water park. Even a la… Read more...
On the way to camp this morning, we passed Hazel’s elementary school and she started sobbing. I asked her what was wrong, though I already knew.
“I miss Miss Zimmerman,” she said from the back seat. And then she cried real hard, as if the words out loud were tell… 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...
My peeling deck is a trophy.
The damp garage, the unmanicured garden, the semi-clogged drain, my frayed hoodie.
Though ugly and inconvenient,
these things
are proof
that my focus is in the right place.
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’ve been going through old papers. My mom saved everything, especially the art stuff: Half finished pictures, 3 words on an otherwise blank page, an excessively pasty attempt at a pop-up book…
I found a gem.
Apparently, when I was in second grade I wrote my first poem.… 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...
I had been running around all morning figuring out how to FedEx my suit overnight so I’d have it in time.
When I opened the door to the room, there he was, laying on a single bed, on his side, knees bent, hands flat together, snugly tucked under his cheek. He lay there grinn… Read more...
We’d just seen “Annie” in the Presidio, her first real production so she was pretty wired even though it was 10 o’clock at night.
On a whim, I decided to drive her by her mom’s old apartment in lower Pac Heights.
“The white one?”
“Yup.… Read more...