People who know how to tell a good love story say that the basic formula for such tales is “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.” And if you watch enough movies, you’ll eventually see that plot rolled out over and over again. A lot of those stories end happily right after the boy wins the girl back, and the implication is that whatever happens next, the pair is together for good.

            Well, we hope so, but for their happiness to continue, at some point, they also have to accommodate the routine requirements of life. In addition to looking dreamily into one another’s eyes, they eventually have to decide who is going to do the ironing, pay the bills, mow the grass, clean the bathroom, get the oil changed in the car and so forth.

            Now think about that last great vacation you took. It was fun, but few of us can leave for vacation without stopping the mail and the paper, arranging for someone to feed our pets, planning how our bills will get paid while we are away, making sure we are leaving our work in order so that either someone else can cover our duties while we are gone or we have things done ahead so that everything doesn’t fall apart during our absence.

            The same principle is true in most of the things in life that give us pleasure. Many of them simply could not be sustained without a framework of tedium that deals with making a living, maintaining relationships, fulfilling promises and handling everyday responsibilities.

            In fact, people who study job-satisfaction say that even those who have jobs they love still find some aspects of their work dull. Some job research suggests that if you like 65 percent of the work you do, you’ve got a great job. That’s because almost every position requires about 35 percent of your time be spent on prosaic, even boring tasks, but tasks that are essential to your work and that allow the enjoyable 65 percent to take place.

            Back in the last century, Theodore Parker Ferris, who was Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston, commented that “Life is a strange mixture of rapture and routine, and we cannot have one without the other.”¹ I think he was right. What’s more, noticing how he paired the words “rapture” and “routine,” two words that start with

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