It’s Ruff Getting Back on Your Feet

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, I’m glad you’re joining me. I hope you decide to stick around. To my returning listeners, welcome back. What do you do to recover quickly from an illness? Asking for a friend.

Children are one of life’s greatest gifts. The shared experience of joy you feel when you make a baby laugh is difficult to put into words. It’s amazing how having a daughter has made me so excited about the smallest things she does. Crawling, shutting and opening doors, turning the pages of one of her board books, climbing down from the couch without falling: each of these mundane activities is transformed into a thrilling example of her growth and development.

And here is something I find myself thinking about as I watch her learn. Every single one of those skills started as something hard. Something that required enormous concentration and repetition. Something she failed at, over and over, before it became easy. Now she does them without thinking. They are habits imprinted on her body, built one attempt at a time. I think there is something in that worth remembering.

So yes, children are wonderful. Children are also horrible little germ factories. They are determined to share every virus they encounter with the people who love them most. Which brings me to today’s expression: sick as a dog.

Now, today, dogs are not known for being particularly susceptible to sickness. The expression goes back to a time when dogs weren’t seen as the lovable pets that they are today. Back in the 1700s, dogs were often kept outside in poor conditions. They looked mangy and often engaged in rather gross and unsanitary behaviors. In English, we often use animals in comparisons to add emphasis. Sick as a dog simply means very sick. Extremely unwell. Not just a little under the weather.

Under the weather, by the way, is another common English expression for feeling unwell. It’s an old sailing term. When sailors felt ill, they would go below deck to shelter from the weather. To be under the weather meant to be below deck, out of the elements, because you were too sick to be above.

And one more: to come down with something. If you come down with an illness, it means the illness has arrived and settled in. You wake up one morning and you have caught a cold, the flu, or a fever. You have come down with it.

Sick as a dog. Under the weather. Come down with something. Keep those in mind, because unfortunately you’re likely to have a use for them someday.

Earlier this week, my wife Emma decided to go to our local public library to see what kinds of community activities they might be holding for the summer. Before we moved to our new apartment a year ago, we lived within walking distance of the library. We used to go more frequently, but with our move to the other side of town, the birth of our daughter, and our work schedules, we haven’t been to the library in a while even though it used to be a habit for us. It was something we did naturally, without much thought, because it was close and convenient. When the conditions changed, the habit disappeared. That’s how habits work. They are more fragile than they feel. And rebuilding them takes time and intention.

Now, the San Marcos Public Library has a surprising variety of summer activities. Every Tuesday they host a “baby story time,” where parents can bring their young children to listen to stories and play games. Emma brought Eliana for the first time this week, and it seemed to be a great success. Eliana hasn’t had a lot of opportunity to socialize with other babies, so this is a great chance for her to build the skills to play well with others. We’re hoping that baby story time becomes a regular thing for us . A new habit, built one Tuesday at a time.

The next day, the library had another event called “Zoomagination,” and the girls ended up going to that as well. I’m a bit sad that I missed it. From what Emma told me, this was an event designed to introduce kids to exotic animals, meaning animals that are unusual or from a foreign land. Two professional animal handlers brought in a snake, a baby kangaroo, a two-toed sloth, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Two quick facts: baby kangaroos are called joeys, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches can grow up to 10 centimeters long.

Both events were really fun for my wife and daughter. But that fun was not without its consequences. It seems that, in socializing with the other children at the library, Eliana may have brought home a little more than we bargained for.

I was teaching my evening classes yesterday when, suddenly, at 7:00 on the dot, I was hit with an absolutely pounding headache. My sinuses felt stuffed up and soon began to burn. I was able to wrap up my last two lessons and then retire for the evening. Sleep, however, only seemed to make things worse. I woke up sick as a dog.

Now, drugged up on cold medicine, I sit here telling you this story. The symptoms are miserable, but not serious. Headache, congestion, sinus pain, coughing, and sneezing. I’m sure I’ll get through it in another day or two.

Alright. I’m not better yet, but let’s talk about getting there.

In the warm-up, we looked at a few expressions for falling ill. Now let’s look at the other side of the experience, because English has just as many expressions for recovering as it does for getting sick.

The first one is: on the mend. If you are on the mend, you are recovering. You are not fully well yet, but you are moving in the right direction. The word mend means to repair something that is broken. So to be on the mend is to be in the process of repairing yourself. A doctor might say, “You’re on the mend now. Just rest up and drink plenty of water.” Or a friend might ask, “Are you on the mend yet?” Meaning: are you getting better?

The second expression is: back on your feet. To be back on your feet means to have recovered fully and returned to normal life. It usually implies that you were knocked down by the illness and now you are standing again. It often comes with a time frame. I should be back on my feet by Thursday. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be back on my feet. It is a confident, forward-looking expression.

Then there are two expressions for the process of recovering. To sleep it off means to recover from something by sleeping. Sleep it off is most commonly used for minor illnesses or for recovering from a long and tiring day. Just go home, sleep it off, and you’ll feel better in the morning. And to ride it out means to endure something unpleasant until it ends naturally, without trying to fight it. You can’t rush a cold. Sometimes you just have to ride it out.

So where am I right now? Somewhere between under the weather and on the mend. Not yet back on my feet. But riding it out.

Here’s the challenge for today’s episode: use at least one of today’s expressions this week. On the mend, back on your feet, ride it out. And if you happen to come down with something in the meantime, I hope you recover quickly.

When I was younger, I heard that it takes two weeks to build a habit. But from what I’ve now read on the subject, that’s not really accurate. How long it takes to build a habit depends on the difficulty of the task, your own personality, and a host of other biological and social factors. It could range from as few as 18 days to as many as 250. There is no magic number. There is only the doing of it, repeated until it becomes second nature.

I want to make creating this podcast a habit. I’d like to continue making episodes far into the future. If one day I look back and see 1,000 episodes recorded, I’ll think to myself, “That’s a good start.”

Now, I think about Eliana learning to crawl. Learning to turn the pages of her books. Learning to climb down from the couch. She didn’t do any of those things on her first attempt. She fell, she tried again, she got frustrated, she tried again. She didn’t decide it was too hard and give up. She just kept going, because that’s what you do when you’re eleven months old and the world is full of things worth learning. I think about that a lot, because I am trying to learn something too. And the same rules apply.

Sometimes life conspires to interfere with your plans. Conspires means things seem to work against you almost on purpose, as if the universe had a meeting and decided today was not your day. Today, I got sick. Maybe tomorrow there will be extra work to do around the house, or a community event I want to attend with my family, or a friend in need. The library was a habit once, and then it wasn’t, because life changed. I don’t want that to happen to this.

So here is what I’ve decided. On the days when making an episode is easy, I’ll make it. And on the days when making an episode is hard, when I’m tired, busy, or drugged up on cold medicine and sneezing up a storm, I’ll make it then too. Especially then. Because those are the days that actually build the habit. The easy days don’t test anything. The hard days are where the habit is made or broken.

I want to make the hard days a habit.

So here I am. Not yet on the mend. Sneezing into the microphone. But here I am.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.