Cynicism is a luxury; hope is a necessity.

This morning went the way most of our mornings go, which is to say I barely noticed it. The lights came on when I asked them to. The water was hot. The coffee maker did the one thing it exists to do. My daughter found her shoes more or less where she had left them, the car started, the road to school was open, and by half past eight I was at my desk having given almost none of it much focused thought. A routine morning is a forgettable one. That is, in a sense, what makes it smooth. A working system has that strange quality: it disappears. We notice the plumbing only when it leaks, the power only when it fails, the road only when it is closed. Attention is drawn to friction — to the broken and the missing — and slides off whatever is quietly doing its job. This is mostly a mercy; we could not function if every functioning thing demanded to be considered. But it leaves a consequence worth sitting with: The better a system serves us, the less of it we ever have to see. Ease and…