Do you dawdle or do you linger?

When I was about seven years old, I remember sitting at the kitchen table in the morning, eating oatmeal. It was a school day, and I do believe I was dawdling.  My grandmother spoke sternly, 

“Hurry up.  You’re going to be late.”

I was raised by my grandparents and most likely they had little patience for a youngster who was challenging, somewhat lazy, and stubborn.  I continued to dawdle.  

Grandma had a wooden paddle that hung on the wall next to the pencil sharpener behind the kitchen door.  It had a few cracks in it, and I can assure you, I was never hit with it.  There were only moments of threats that often worked with intended purpose.  However, that morning I remained steadfast in my dawdling until the paddle came off the hook, and slammed down  about 2 inches from my elbow which was leaning on the kitchen table.  A more emphatic stern voice repeated, 

“Hurry up!  You’re going to be late!”  

At that point my dawdling stopped. I quickly finished my breakfast and hightailed out of the house and off to school.  

This memory leads me to think that if I could have made the argument I was not dawdling but merely lingering, perhaps to savor the wonderful oatmeal my grandmother had made for me—you know, the kind with brown sugar and warm milk—I might have avoided the dreaded paddle threat.  But I was not clever at age seven.  And in fact, under the circumstances, I was rather dutiful.

This dawdling versus lingering seems a conundrum to me.  Physically, both are exhibited in the same way— “to move slowly and idly,” or “to spend a long time over something.”  I’m guessing it’s the intent behind the action that defines which word best describes what I was doing that morning before school.  And it does seem that dawdling has a more negative connotation than lingering.  

The older I get, the more I seem to dawdle AND to linger.  In some cases, it’s either my knees or my memory that causes me to dawdle.  And in other cases, it’s my sentimentality or perhaps my sense of spirituality that leads me to linger upon those things I find worthy and meaningful.  

Learning to dawdle and to linger is a lifetime achievement.  Most of us in our younger days were discouraged from such behavior, but now, if you happen to be in my generation of Baby Boomers, you might find advantages to dawdling and lingering.  After all, are we not now in charge of our own paddles?