July 26

What is essential about you is hard to pin down in advance. When you try, you usually end up with big words: convictions, values, work you're attached to. They sound like a core.

Then something fundamental changes. A job ends, a city lies behind you, a person is no longer there every day. Some things you thought indispensable come loose surprisingly quietly. You hardly miss them. Others hang on stubbornly, though you never gave them any importance: the way you give strangers directions, a laugh in the wrong place, the habit of looking for the window first when you enter a room.

This isn't comfortable. You would rather choose your essence than discover it only after the fact. And the longer you look, the less clean the distinction becomes. What came into your life by chance may have written itself in so deeply that nothing more necessary stands beside it.

Someone who has known you a long time would probably recognize you by something you yourself would never have put on a list.