I love the person I am becoming.

Affection for a draft is a difficult skill. Most people can admire a finished thing. Fewer can look at a half-planed board, still rough at one end, and feel anything but impatience. The person you're becoming is that board — visible grain, tool marks, one corner not yet touched.

A cabinetmaker I knew kept the first drawer he ever made, badly dovetailed, in his own kitchen. Not as a joke about how far he'd come. He liked the person who made it, working carefully with everything he knew at the time.