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
We’re often one question away from peace.
No matter how serious or stressful the situation may feel, if we can figure out the right question to ask (and answer), our suffering will begin to lessen
I ask questions all day long. In some ways I feel like a safe cracker with his … Read more...
Every morning, blanketed in the black before sunrise, I walk into my office, and I’m faced with the same decision:
Do I start digging into my work pile and get a jump on my to-do’s,
OR
Do I stop and do something that seems both self-indulgent and impractical? In other wo… Read more...
We should all pause and smile when someone mentions a loved one that’s passed away.
In that moment, that loved one is alive again, as if they’ve stepped into the room with their signature style and voice, that smirk they always have, the particular cadence of their wor… Read more...
Sometimes, gratitude isn’t so easy to come by.
If you’re having trouble finding it, here’s some advice: take a crappy vacation.
You don’t have to actually go anywhere; just plan it. Plan it in your head.
Where are you staying?
Are you inside or outside?
What ca… Read more...
I just read Catcher in the Rye again.
Funny how different you can see a book the second or third or fourth time you read it.
In high school, as a mixed-race-white-looking-class-individual-child-of-divorce-latchkey-kid, I saw Holden Caulfield as a hero: a justifiably disaffected, per… Read more...
I gain empathy for a person immediately after I get to know them. We all do. That’s how it works.
But why wait until then?
I went to a Latin Jazz/Funk show because I felt the need to move around after a particularly heavy week. We got there early to beat the crowd and get a g… Read more...
I was hard at work prepping for a school fundraiser at my house.
I had just finished calibrating the stereo and microphones. I still needed to set up the auxiliary A/V system (just in case), make blackberry rosemary syrup for the cocktails, trim back the ivy on the stoop, vacuum t… Read more...
My daughter gave me a homework assignment before she fluttered off to Santa Cruz for a Girl Scout sleepover:
“I need to catch a fly for Biotech class.”
Easy enough.
Flies seem to find their way into our sunroom all the time. If one didn’t end lifeless on the window… Read more...
When someone breaks something of ours – a thief cracking our window, a boss changing our schedule, a loved one not showing up — we blame them for disrupting our way of being. We villify them.
And perhaps we are right. Maybe they are the evil in our hero’s quest.
B… Read more...
I finally ran out of staples.
It took 25 years.
In my first job as a temp at the Writer’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, I went into the supply closet after hours and stole a crate of staples. Not a box, a whole crate.
The staples were for my manuscripts.
Writing was my thing… Read more...