I was thinking this morning about how much work we do in life that nobody ever sees.

Not work in the usual sense.

I mean the things you do and, if you do them well, nothing happens.

You make the phone call before the problem gets worse.

You remember the thing everybody else forgot.

You sit in a waiting room.

You drive somebody somewhere.

You get up early.

You stay a little later.

You answer the phone when you really don't want to.

Sometimes the accomplishment is simply that the wheels stayed on.

I know that feeling from practicing law.

Some of the best work I ever did for a client resulted in absolutely nothing happening.

No lawsuit.

No crisis.

No dramatic ending.

The problem went away.

Nobody writes you a thank-you note for the catastrophe that never occurred.

Family life is even more like that.

I think about my mother.

So much of what she did disappeared almost immediately.

Food was made and eaten.

Clothes were washed and worn again.

Children were taken where they needed to go.

Money somehow stretched.

Morning came, and the house was still running.

As a child, I certainly did not stand there admiring any of this.

I ate breakfast.

That was about the extent of my appreciation.

Years later, you understand.

Marriage is full of the same work.

So is fatherhood.

Somebody notices.

Somebody remembers.

Somebody gets up.

Somebody stays.

And most of it never appears on anybody's résumé.

I wrote a poem called “UNSEEN WORK” in By What It Does.

There is a line in it:

Some work is real because something does not happen.

I think that may be closer to how life actually works than most of the ways we measure success.

In Still Functioning, I approached the same idea from another angle.

Some lives are not built around closure.

They are not built around applause.

They are built around keeping the right things running.

That does not sound very glamorous.

It is not.

But it is real.

And it probably explains why I keep writing about people who stay.

Across the books, the setting changes.

Sometimes it is a family.

Sometimes it is a courtroom.

Sometimes it is a hospital room.

Sometimes it is an imagined world.

But the question underneath is often the same:

What does a person do when something still has to be carried?

I am 62 now, and when I look backward, some of the things that matter most to me would be almost impossible to put on a list.

I was there.

I answered.

I carried something when it needed carrying.

Someone I loved knew where to find me.

And there were plenty of times I got it wrong.

Plenty of times I was tired, irritated, impatient, or wished somebody else would handle it.

That is part of the truth too.

The work nobody sees isn't done by saints.

Most of the time, tired people do it because they have something else they would rather be doing.

They do it anyway.

Then tomorrow comes.

And they do it again.

A lot of a human life is probably built that way.

Quietly.

One ordinary act on top of another.

And when it is done well, sometimes the only evidence is that someone else had breakfast, got home safely, was not alone, or never knew how close something came to falling apart.

That is enough evidence for me.