The Art of Lingering

I spent twenty minutes in the garden this morning, just watching a single bumblebee work its way through the lavender. I had a list of things to do—emails to send, laundry to fold—but the way it moved was so deliberate, so entirely focused on the task at hand, that I found myself slowing down too. It didn’t care about the wind or the noise of the neighbors’ lawnmower. It just moved from one bloom to the next, finding exactly what it needed. We spend so much of our lives rushing toward the next thing, rarely stopping to taste the sweetness of the present. I think we forget that we are allowed to linger. We are allowed to be still and just exist in the middle of a task, finding joy in the small, quiet work of being alive. When was the last time you let yourself stay in one place long enough to see the world actually working?

Jana Z has captured this exact feeling of quiet focus in her image titled Yummy. It reminds me that there is so much beauty happening right under our noses if we only take the time to look. Does this image make you want to slow down today?