I ended the twelfth chapter by saying that the argument was complete, and it is. The principles have been written down, the practice examined, the country's moment set out as plainly as I know how. There is no more argument to make. What I have left to write is not an argument at all. It is a return.
The book began behind a counter, and it seems right that it should end there — a story that started in one place owes its ending a walk back to where it began. So let me go back. To Georgetown. To 2014. To the first time I stood on the other side of a bank counter and understood that I was the one now being counted on.
The woman who taught me to count
I wrote earlier in this book about the woman who trained me at Scotiabank — a patient, meticulous professional who showed me how to count, how to balance, how to handle a difficult customer with grace. I want to come back to her now, because she shaped everything that followed.
She probably does not remember me. I was one more new teller, and there was nothing about me, on my first day, that would have made me worth remembering. But I remember her. I remember how she taught counting not as arithmetic but as attention — a habit of noticing what was in front of you, slowly and exactly, until getting it right required no effort at all. She taught me that a drawer had to balance to the dollar, not approximately, and that the search for the missing dollar, when it came, was not a punishment but a discipline. And she taught me, by the way she carried herself through a difficult exchange, that service and self-respect could occupy the same moment without crowding each other out.
I have tried, in the years since, to hold her standard rather than her title: the quiet insistence that the work be done properly, for its own sake, with no audience required. When I wrote about accuracy as a habit, about integrity when no one is watching, about preparing before you engage, I was describing patterns I first watched her demonstrate before I could name them.
What the 2014 self would think
And this is where I want to be honest, because it is the question a return to the beginning always raises. What would the teller I was in 2014 think of the director I am today?
The answer, I think, is not the triumphant one. The 2014 version of me, standing at that counter, would have found the present-day rooms almost unrecognisable — the meetings with ministers and regulators, the board reporting I support, the international flights, the coordination of ESG and compliance work across a large-scale mining operation. He would have been a little overwhelmed, a little disbelieving that such a distance was even possible from where he stood.
But I do not think he would have been surprised that a way of working could carry someone that far, because he had just met the woman who taught him one. He would not have seen the plan — there was no plan — but he would have recognised the habits the moment they reappeared, the way you recognise a voice in a crowded room. Accuracy that had to balance exactly. Service without subservience. Preparation before the work. Follow-through on promises. The same few things, done faithfully. The 2014 self would not recognise the rooms, but he would recognise the person standing in them — which is the whole quiet point of this book.
Do not rush past your beginnings
So let me say to you, the reader, the one invitation I most want to leave. Do not rush past your beginnings.
I know how strong the pull is to hurry away from the entry-level role, the first job, the counter or the reception desk — to treat it as a waiting room you are merely passing through on the way to the real work. I understand it, because I felt it. Some days at that counter, I wanted the next chapter. But the counter was not a delay in my story. It was the first long paragraph of it, and nearly every lesson I have leaned on since was drafted there.
The beginning is where the habits are set before anyone is watching. It is where you decide, with nothing at stake and no one to impress, what kind of professional you are going to be. And that decision, made early and quietly, travels further than any title. If you build the way of working first, the work will keep up with you. But if you spend your beginnings looking for the exit, you can miss the place where the whole thing is being built.
The professional you will be in a decade is not waiting at the end of the road for you to arrive. They are standing at the start of it, at your first counter, doing the first piece of work carefully. Be patient with them. They are building something you will rely on for longer than you think.
The counter never left
I have written this book, thirteen years of chapters and rooms, to answer one question: what connects a 2014 teller counter to the rooms in which Guyana's future is being decided? Here, at the end, I can give the answer quietly.
The distance looked wide, and in one sense it was — three sectors, three continents, a dozen titles. But the connection was never a path, and never a plan. It was a way of working that never changed, carried faithfully from the first drawer to the last brief. The counter was not left behind. It came with me — renamed, re-scoped, applied to wider stages, but the same counter. The two ends of the counter are the same person, connected by a way of working.