The world is a diverse, complex place, filled with a plethora of personalities, some pleasing and some quite perplexing. I live in the same house with one of the most perplexing personalities—a dawdler.
Even the dictionaries have difficulty pinning ‘dawdler’ down. Some define a dawdler as someone who is ‘slow or lags behind,’ or someone who ‘wastes time; a trifler’.
Another dictionary defines a dawdler as someone who ‘takes more time than necessary’ or ‘moves aimlessly.’ All these definitions share the misuse of time. That is the part of my dawdler’s personality that nettles me.
Here’s a typical scene. The dawdler (my significant other) and I are about to go for our daily walk. I get dressed and wait patiently near the door, while she takes over two minutes to decide which socks to wear in her hiking boots, then has to stop and check the thermostat before we leave the house, and finally takes a full three minutes to check each of the potted plants just inside the door.
You might think that once we’re outside the house, the dawdling is done and we can start walking. Boy, would you be wrong. First, she has to straighten the doormat; then she notices a piece of paper in the flower bed near the entrance, which she has to take to the trash bin on the other side of the house.
By the time we actually get started on our three-mile walk, a full fifteen or twenty minutes have passed. This isn’t just now and then; it’s every single time. And it’s been this way for the fifty-plus years we’ve been a couple.
What have I learned from this, you might ask? A lot, actually. The main thing is patience. You learn that some personalities are set in concrete, and no matter how much you rant and rave, they will not change. All you can do is take a deep breath and let them do their thing. You do get accustomed to it after a while, so it’s mildly amusing and slightly irritating instead of maddening. I wish I could say, though, that my dawdling wife is the only one I ever have to deal with.
Alas, dawdling seems to affect a significant percentage of the population. I have students who can never sit down to a project and see it through without going off on three or four other tangents. When I worked in government, every assignment had at least one person — including a few of my supervisors — who was like a butterfly in a flower garden, flitting from blossom to blossom and never in a straight line.
Could it be, you think, that dawdlers are the normal people, and people like me are the weirdos? If that’s the case, I suppose my decision to quit making a fuss about it was the wise thing to do. | NWI
