There are the easy things, the things I identified early: a love of travel, especially alone; a tendency to procrastinate on packing for said travel until the last possible moment; a belief that it is better to deliver (and to sometimes have to invent) the right team for the job than to be the only person who can do the job.

There are the harder things, the things that took me longer to name: a discomfort with sentiment; an intense competitive streak applied only to oneself and one’s self; a sometimes inconveniently acute dislike of graft and incompetence and bullying; a fundamental distaste for unearned authority; a deep impatience for excuses; a deep impatience, generally.

Every year there is more to learn / acknowledge / realize / confess to myself if not to others how much of me is him.

Attribution

I read how some mammals never
forget their young—

their speckled spots, odd goat
cries, or birthmarks on curved
ivory tusks. There must be some
thread of magic there

cooling honey to stone—where
like recognizes like or how
a rib seeks its twin.

— from A Taste of Blue by Cynthia Manick