Life can be loud and noisy at times. It can pull us in a thousand directions. Our schedules become full. Our heads become full. We dart around from one thought to the next, one place to the next, one responsibility to the next.

In our commotion, the people we love can fall out of our field of vision. The comfort, safety, and shelter we once found in them, or that they once found in us, can be replaced by pressures, annoyances, and challenges. Our relationships with them can change.

Maintaining love is not easy.

But maybe that’s a good thing. For if love were such a simple emotion that it could merely be maintained, what rewards would we receive from it?

My life has been loud and noisy for some time now. My children are young. They constantly demand my or my wife’s attention. Work is busy. Money is tight.

Every day brings with it a seemingly endless amount of duties and tasks that must be done. The day-to-day grind can be exhausting. Sometimes it gets the better of me.

At the end of the day, if I remember to look back and reflect, I often find that my wife and I don’t have much time for each other. We talk, of course, and interact. We share our stories of the day and make more plans for the next day and the following weekend, but all too often, we do this from a place of distraction. All too often, we don’t share more than half a moment of quality time together in a single day—a quick goodbye kiss or a heartfelt Good morning.

Many of our conversations are interrupted, and if they aren’t interrupted, they are filled with distracted questions and busied requests like Huh?, What?, Just a minute.

Maintaining our love is not easy. It is something that gets pushed to the wayside. With all the other things calling out for our attention, maintaining our love often gets overlooked. It seems ridiculous that something so important can be taken for granted, that it can be placed behind things like money and work on our list of priorities. But it can.

The quiet things in our life, the ones we depend on the most, don’t call out for our attention, not until there is a problem.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took our children to a park.

It was a park that none of us had ever been to before. Unlike many of the places we often frequent, this park was set in the foothills of the mountains outside of the city where we live. It covered a large area of land and was surrounded by nature. Finding the area we were looking for, where there were rabbits and deer to look at and jungle gyms to play on took time. It involved driving down winding roads that climbed up and down and wrapped around forested hills. It involved getting a little lost and turning around many times, and it also involved a short hike up a cedar-covered hill.

As the path that we followed began to flatten and round a bend, the trees thinned and some animal pens came into sight. My wife and I pointed them out and our children got excited.

We moved over to a nearby rabbit cage and looked at the animals inside. I picked my son and daughter up so they could both see the rabbits up close. As I did so, my wife moved around to the other side of the rabbit pen and took pictures of us.

I knew she would do this. Before she even began doing it, I knew she would because that’s what she always does. She is the primary picture taker in our house. The chronicler. And so, often, she is on the outside of things looking in.

As she began taking pictures of my children and I, I looked through the open spaces of the chicken wire that formed the walls of the rabbits’ pen, past the rabbits themselves and the wooden house that offered them shelter, and I saw my wife, her eyes crossed in concentration from looking at the screen of her iPhone, her mouth slack and slightly open.