Taking Things for Granted

Adam: I hope being away from you this long means it will take longer before I take you for granted. I just don't want to ever be bored or annoyed with you after having to not be near you this long.me: Awwwww!

I hope I'm not boring or annoying!

Adam: you aren't!

me: Aww!

Adam: I think most couples eventually take each other for granted and then have to learn to live togetherme: That's true.

We can try.

In the midst of my frustrated staring this afternoon at the late fifteenth-century manuscript I've been working on, I paused to stretch and look around. My gaze rose to the ceiling of the seventeenth-century library, the Duke Humphries Library, in which I do much of my work. The Latin motto of the university, Dominus illuminatio mea ("the Lord is my light") stared down at me fifty times. I looked out the window in the Fellows' Garden of my thirteenth-century college, Exeter. Then it hit me. I really don't notice these gorgeous parts of my everyday life anymore. Even some of Western civilization's most beautiful and historic treasures are now part of my mundane, every day life.

Several weeks ago, Adam dropped a surprising comment out of the blue: "I hope being away from you this long means it will take longer before I take you for granted. I just don't want to ever be bored or annoyed with you after having to not be near you this long." I'm so excited about marrying Adam, it's difficult to image ever losing my delighted pleasure in his company. Still, I suppose that if experience has taught me anything, it's that I quickly get used to new experiences. I could focus on this realization as yet another reminder to love life as it is, right now--I should love Adam in the same passionate, infinitely renewable way I do now. But I don't think it's in human nature to continue perceiving blessings as novel. In one way, Adam has to be right. My love for him will continue to evolve and change. We will have to learn to live together, even when we find each other boring or annoying. Of course, learning to love as it is here and now is an important part of living a life of gratitude. As annoyed as I may someday be with Adam, I hope I never take him for granted. He is a gift from God, a blessing I never want to forget.

The photo of Exeter is obviously a cheat. I don't have a picture of the Fellows' Garden in the springtime.