A carpenter’s care often disappears into the straightness everyone takes for granted.

Good work is invisible when it succeeds. Nobody stands in a room admiring the fact that the door shuts, the shelf is level and the joints have not opened; those things simply fail to be noticed, which is precisely the outcome the maker was working towards. Attention only arrives when something is wrong. That is a strange bargain to accept, and most skilled work accepts it.

If you depend on someone whose success looks like nothing happening, say so out loud this week. And when your own careful work goes unremarked, take the silence as the review it actually is.