It stared with a single strand of lights and then became more: the results of lingering with a project

I’ve been in a bad habit recently of staying up late. I’m not a night owl, and I don’t even need to stay awake either. I’ve just been finding it difficult to get to bed early because I just don’t want each day to end. I am simply too enamored of daily life and all the activities it brings to want to put each day to an early close.

My term for this behavior is lingering. Its symptoms include wanting to stay in the present moment. Yearning to eke the most out of every hour. Not desiring to move on to the next thing until the present experience is fully consummated. When afflicted with lingering, it can be difficult to switch activities or to call it a day.

I find myself lingering quite frequently, and not just late at night. If I get my mind on something I like, then I’ll keep working at it until I fully accomplish it to my liking. Maybe I’ve got a project to fix, and I keep chipping away at it, irresistibly beginning the next stages of my project until its completion. Or maybe I’m reading a book and want to continue on, just a few more pages at a time, until I’m finished. Though I’m great at making schedules, I’m also great at willfully, consciously, breaking them. It’s easy to give myself just five more minutes at a task. I can easily justify that. And then I can just as easily justify five minutes more. And again. And again. And again. Lingering.

Naturally, with this tendency towards lingering, things tend to take longer than planned. And, little irks me more than feeling in a rush; my preferred modus operandi is giving each thing its due time needed to complete it fully and completely. In terms of time schedules and to-do lists, I’m always quite constantly behind. But on the flipside, what I do accomplish I can be very satisfied with.

Lingering is quite applicable to spending time with people too. As an introvert, I don’t frequently visit with other people. But the time I do spend, I spend as someone who is fully present, immersed in the moments as they happen one by one. I don’t tend to leave early, and if I do, I am quite conscious of what I may be missing out on in my absence. No, I’d rather linger on in the moments more, until the peak of socialization has all but wrapped up. I feel more complete leaving a place when all the fraternity has naturally come to a close. And I’ll usually stay on to linger for just a little longer.

At its core, I believe this notion of lingering is rooted in the human propensity to settle down. To put down roots. If a place, if a situation is good, then it compels one to stay for a bit more. No need to rush off to try something new. No overwhelming urge to discover something different. Just keep on doing what you’ve been doing. The more you desire to linger on, the less easy it becomes to realize how much time is going by. Nights of lingering turn into weeks of lingering, and yet you always find more to do while you’re in the present. One can never really leave a place without experiencing it to the fullest of its myriad possibilities. To do so, you need to linger on a bit longer, and in lingering on you discover just a bit more to do, again and again…

Though I like to linger on in the present places and moments, I realize this tendency can also lead to stagnation and prohibit future discoveries elsewhere. It is true that with a creative mind, one will continually find new inspiration in a single place, and equally true that getting to know somewhere or someone can never be fully exhausted. But there are just so many other things to try out there. As philosopher Henry David Thoreau once reckoned about leaving his Walden shack after two years—a place he thoroughly enjoyed to linger—“perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” Thoreau knew how to linger. But, he also knew that sometimes one has to move on as well.

Ultimately it is the external pressure of a change in my life history that halts the lingering and compels me to move on. I’ve lived in many places and have worked many jobs. If each job I’ve held was indefinite, I could have easily imagined myself staying on longer with each one. Doing so would be a tendency for lingering on a larger life-scale. But outside forces oblige me to move on, and though I’m often sad that I have had to leave the present situation, leaving also makes way for the new. You can’t linger on continually into the night; eventually you’ll have to go to sleep and wake up fresh with a new morning.

But in the meantime, enjoy lingering in the moment…especially this holiday season.