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
The problem with Self Help is that it presupposes there is something wrong with the way you are now.
But fully embracing your current state, whatever that may be, can prevent meaningful growth and change.
Take the simple example of lying on the couch. When you resent yourself for l… Read more...
I thought I didn’t have a religion, but then I realized I’m wrong about that.
I realized it when I was having a bad morning and pulled a chair out into the sun and picked up a book of short stories by a guy who’s long gone and then I started reading one of the st… Read more...
I wake up with my throat on fire, my body and eyelids heavy.
My phone beeps with bad news, it’s still dark outside, exhaustion balled up in my chest like compacted cement, layers formed across months.
I get up only because I know it will be harder if I don’t.
So heavy, s… Read more...
My daughter is picking her high school – 2 good options – and she’s tormented by it.
We all are.
I’ve made a career out of helping people make decisions. I know the exercises, I have the tactics, the methods, the rubrics.
That doesn’t make the actual de… Read more...
The Elements of Happiness are obvious.
We all know what they are:
healthy food, rest, exercise, sobriety, nature, connection, work, love, fun, self-expression.
We have the map. If we just charge after these things and do them often, we have a greater chance of being Happy. It’… Read more...
When I was in high school I got my heart broken and I listened to Every Rose Has Its Thorn ad nausum for 3 days straight.
It was a dark time. Literally. I covered my walls in black satin and traded in soft white light bulbs for red floodlights. Total fire hazard, but who really ca… Read more...
A white man looked out his window and saw a black woman in her yard, pulling her house apart. He noticed her doing this every day, sometimes just a single brick took all afternoon. She was using a spoon.
He couldn’t stay away for very long.
“Why are you destroying your … Read more...
My grad school professor, in describing my laid-back ambition said it was as if a fireball were blazing down the street and there I am jogging gingerly after it, big dopey smile on my face, looking around at the sidelines.
I think of this jogging metaphor often.
It’s widely b… Read more...
Mysteries drive us… to peace and to madness.
Sometimes, we can never truly know the source of our pain.
Losing someone, falling out of love, getting laid off, being ignored. These things hurt us deeply. They stab at us in the most tender of places, and the pain persists becau… 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...