Real Life

I just finished re-reading Anne Lamott's "Grace (Eventually)" and liked it again.  Truth be told, I'm not in a very Anne Lamott kind of place right now.  But I was thinking about my marriage today and the little everyday moments that move us along and I was reminded of something she wrote,

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival.  But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.

She was relating this to the story of her son Sam moving inch by inch in a sleeping bag, over weeks, down the hall from her room to his new room in their new house.

scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch.

I feel this is appropriate.  People don't learn to live together instantly.  Every intimate relationship takes thousands of moments, thousands of choices and hundreds of arguments and conversations and exasperated sighs to develop.  I don't wake up knowing how to best love Peter on any given day.  He doesn't love me perfectly from the second I step foot in the door at night until the instant I fall asleep.  We don't make decisions smoothly or incorporate each other into our processes very graciously.  But we do scootch along.  We get bogged down; we stall, but we're moving.  Slowly but surely, we're inching down the hall.