handcraftedadventure 
There’s a version of your life you keep meaning to get to. The life you’re postponing isn’t a dramatic one. Not a fantasy. Just the version where you actually do the things you say matter — where you’re present at dinner instead of half-thinking about the week ahead, where Saturday morning doesn’t disappear into logistics, … Read more
I want to tell you something about the heading exercise that I didn’t expect. I thought it would feel clarifying. Like the moment you finally name something that’s been circling, and suddenly the room gets clearer. That’s the version I had in my head going in — a small revelation, a sentence I’d write down … Read more
For a long time, I treated actual living like something scheduled for later. Later when the schedule eased up. Later when there was more room. Later when the kids were settled and the mortgage smaller and life became slightly less demanding than it currently was. Then Tom had both hips replaced in 2020, and we … Read more
I spent years accumulating a life, and then I spent years quietly letting pieces of it go — without ever calling it that. I started as a secretary. Moved through accounting, became a controller, and then — gradually, for reasons that made sense at the time — stepped back. Part-time. Assistant work. Full charge bookkeeping. … Read more
We’ve only been to Cannon Beach Oregon once. I think about it more than anywhere we’ve been in the last few years — more than places we’ve returned to multiple times, more than trips that required more planning and more money. There’s something about a place that gets you exactly once, in exactly the right … Read more
Day 8. Module 1, Phase 2 — Ownership. Week two of the solo run. This is part of Building It Live — a weekly dispatch from inside the Fully Lived Framework as we run it on ourselves before the September beta. Start from the beginning here. The question the workbook kept circling back to this … Read more
Most plans require you to get out of your pajamas. That sounds like a joke. It isn’t. There’s something that happens between the moment you make a plan and the moment the day actually arrives. When you planned it, leaving the house sounded completely reasonable. Of course you’d go. Why wouldn’t you? And then the … Read more
For most of my adult life, I thought having goals meant I had direction. I always had a list — career goals, health goals, financial goals, trips we kept saying we’d take someday. Some years I hit them. Some years I didn’t. Either way, January would arrive and I’d start over, because that’s what you’re … Read more
May feels like the right month to talk about what’s been on the nightstand — and these four books for midlife readers landed at exactly the right time. Not because I have a reading program or a books-per-month goal. Just because these four have been sitting with me lately and each one hit differently — … Read more
Day 1. Module 1, Phase 1 — Awareness. We opened the workbook last night at the kitchen table and began. Not planning to start. Not talking about starting. Actually opening the pages and doing Day 1. The workbook has been sitting on the desk for a week. I’ve been building the Fully Lived Framework for … Read more