The May Record:
The Month Direction Got Specific
May was the month direction got specific.
May wasn’t a month about starting over. It was a month about finally getting honest.
Honest about the gap between what the calendar shows and what actually matters. Honest about the things we keep almost naming and then don’t. Honest about the drift — not as a dramatic failure, but as the quiet, ordinary thing it is.
Tom and I started the Fully Lived Framework on ourselves this month. Not to test it. Because it was time.
And the same thing kept showing up.
Most of us aren’t lacking information. We’re losing intention. The day fills up, priorities get buried, and what mattered at breakfast is gone by dinner.
The theme that ran underneath everything in May: stop waiting for clarity to arrive and start naming what you already know.
Everything is managed. Very little is chosen.
— The Through-Line of May
01. Mindset & Direction
The mindset posts this month kept circling one question: what happens when you stop managing your life and start choosing it?
The posts moved through the mechanics of returning on a bad day, the difference between goals and a direction, and the specific moment when the easier option appears and you take it anyway.
Pick of the Month The Life You’re Postponing Is the Only One You Have — the most honest thing I’ve written about ordinary drift. If you read one post from May, this is the one.
Also this month:
- How to Reset Your Mindset on a Bad Day
- You Don’t Need Better Goals. You Need a Direction
- Stop Renegotiating Your Life
- The Simple Questions I Stopped Avoiding
- Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back
Three weeks in. Still writing it down.
02. Building It Live — The Framework Series
We started the Fully Lived Framework on ourselves on May 6th. Not as content — as the actual thing. And then we wrote about it honestly, week by week, including the parts where we ran behind and the parts where the hard work turned out to be something completely different from what we expected.
Pick of the Month BIL #4 — The Hardest Part Was Being Honest — we’re running a week behind the ideal pace, and writing about why that’s actually the most useful thing I can tell you about doing this inside a real life.
The full series:
- BIL #1 — We Weren’t Lost. But We Weren’t Quite Found Either.
- BIL #2 — The Small Decisions That Make a Week Feel Like Yours
- BIL #3 — How to Find Your Heading
03. Health & Capacity
The health posts this month were really about one thing: the life you want requires enough capacity to live it. Energy isn’t separate from direction. It’s what lets you act on it.
Pick of the Month How I Have Morning Workout Consistency — not a motivational post. A systems post. The decision gets made the night before, when you’re not tired yet. That’s the whole system.
The decision gets made the night before. That’s the system.
04. Travel & Adventure
The travel posts this month were about treating our own city the way we’d treat somewhere we flew to visit — and one place we visited once, in the fog, that stayed with us.
Pick of the Month We Went Looking for a Hike and Found Something Bigger — Don Robinson State Park, thirty minutes from home, free, sandstone canyon. The post is really about attention. The place just gave us the occasion to write about it.
- Why We Loved Returning to the St. Louis Zoo
- Cannon Beach, Oregon: Fog, Magic, the Perfect Coastal Escape
We went for my birthday, in the fog. It stayed with us.
05. Reading & Favorites
The reading list this month was built around intentional change — books that landed differently because we were doing something with them, not just reading about change. Real reactions, not summaries: What We’re Reading in May: Four Books Worth Your Time.
On the outdoor living side: Our Outdoor Living Favorites to Make Our May Genuinely Better. Raised beds, backyard movie nights, and a few things that have quietly become non-negotiable.
Books that landed differently because we were actually doing something with them.
The May Archive
Everything we published this month:
- How to Reset Your Mindset on a Bad Day
- The Simple Questions I Stopped Avoiding
- You Don’t Need Better Goals. You Need a Direction
- Stop Renegotiating Your Life
- Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back
- The Life You’re Postponing Is the Only One You Have
- BIL #1 — We Weren’t Lost. But We Weren’t Quite Found Either.
- BIL #2 — The Small Decisions That Make a Week Feel Like Yours
- BIL #3 — How to Find Your Heading
- BIL #4 — The Hardest Part Was Being Honest
- How I Have Morning Workout Consistency
- How to Start Living More Fully (Starting This Week)
- Why We Loved Returning to the St. Louis Zoo
- Cannon Beach, Oregon: Fog, Magic, the Perfect Coastal Escape
- We Went Looking for a Hike and Found Something Bigger
- What We’re Reading in May: Four Books Worth Your Time
- Our Outdoor Living Favorites to Make Our May Genuinely Better
June is where the work changes. The Compass work was about seeing clearly — naming the heading, identifying the defaults that were quietly running the show. Now the question changes. It stops asking what matters? and starts asking what are you going to build around it? We’ll be finding out in real time.
If you’d like to follow along — or join us when the beta opens in September — the waitlist is open →
May was the month direction got specific.
June is the month we start building around it.
Krista
Handcrafted Adventure