You don’t build the ordinary love on purpose or with plan,
don’t sit down and designer the ordinary man
that you want to be inside the daily life you’re in—
you just show up every morning
and the building starts again.
Over months and years the showing up accumulates,
over months and years the consistency creates
a structure that you didn’t know you were building all along,
a structure that turns out to be
the most specific kind of strong.
[Chorus]
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, the ordinary strong
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, the whole and the long
Sustained unremarkable entirely remarkable thing
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, the everything
Of the daily choice to keep on building in the regular
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, the spectacular
Invisible construction of the love in the details
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, the love that never fails
Not because it’s perfect but because it’s practiced,
not because it’s easy but because it’s grafted
into the routine of the daily and the morning,
into the structure of the week without the warning
Flags of the dramatic love that needs the occasion—
what we’ve built has no occasion and no station
between the regular and the special, it’s all regular
and the regular is special in the long and secular
[Chorus]
Twenty years from now when someone asks what did you build,
I’ll say the ordinary love, the full and over-filled
with the weeknight and the coffee and the fix,
the love that lives in nothing-special and the regular mix
of two people showing up for their specific life,
the love that doesn’t need the audience or the knife-
edge of the dramatic, the love that runs on low.
What we’ve built, what we’ve built, is the whole show.