There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was a master of finding the light within darkness — a skill aptly demonstrated in “Anthem,” the fifth track on his 1992 record “The Future.” Cohen’s ninth studio album was born amid global tragedy and unrest, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1992 riots in Cohen’s home city of Los Angeles. In a rare statement discussing the meaning of his now-iconic lyrics, Cohen emphasized the inescapable reality of imperfection. “There is a crack in everything that you can put together,” he explained. “Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.” Cohen’s words are a gentle yet firm reminder that perfection is a fallacy at best, and those cracks — emotional, physical, or mental — are inevitable opportunities for evolution, not signs of failure.