The lyric that lives rent free in my head is Leonard Cohen’s line from Anthem, the one about how the cracked places are exactly where the light finds its way in. I first heard it in my twenties and thought it was pretty. Then life got busy handing me actual cracks, and it stopped being pretty and started being load-bearing.

Every time something goes sideways, a job, a plan, a perfectly good Tuesday, that line shows up like a friend who knocks before entering. It doesn’t fix anything. It just reframes the damage as a window. That’s the trick of a great lyric: it waits. You hear it a hundred times, and on the hundred and first it detonates.

Cohen sang it in a voice like gravel in a velvet bag, which helps, because gravel is basically small cracks with confidence. I’ve stopped patching everything. Some cracks are skylights.