Your childhood obsession with dinosaurs, maps or drawing cars wasn’t random. It was a clue you left for later.

Early fixations tend to be about a shape of thinking rather than the subject itself. Maps, dinosaurs, engines: underneath each is a particular pleasure, in systems or in scale or in how things fit together, and that pleasure usually survives long after the subject is abandoned. Children have no reason to fake an interest, which is what makes the record reliable.

Think back to what absorbed you at nine and ask what the pull actually was. Name the underlying quality rather than the topic. Then look for where that same quality exists in what is available to you now.