Episode summary
Guest host Emma takes the mic to chase one small, slippery word. You can lose your keys, lose a game, lose track of time, or lose yourself entirely. What connects them all?
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time. I’m not Tayvin. My name is Emma, his wife, and he kindly let me take over the podcast today. If you’re new here, welcome! If you’re a returning listener, welcome back. Hearing all of Tayvin’s recent podcast episodes got me thinking, and I decided to try my hand at an episode. If this all goes well, I may become a regular fixture on this podcast.
Today, I want to talk about what it feels like to lose things. Before I get into the story, I want to introduce a word. It’s just one word, but it does a surprising amount of work in English. The word is: lose. To lose something.
You probably already know one meaning. To lose something means to no longer know where it is. You had it, and now you don’t. You lost your keys. You lost your phone. That’s the most common meaning, and it will come up in today’s story.
But here’s what I find interesting about this word. In English, we use “lose” for things you can hold in your hand, like a ring. And we also use it for things you can’t hold at all. You can lose time. You can lose patience. You can lose hope. You can lose track of something, meaning you stop paying attention to it. You can lose yourself in a book, meaning you become so absorbed that you forget the world around you. You can lose a friend or loved one, meaning they are no longer in your life, either through death or conflict.
It’s the same word, yet very different things are being lost.
Keep these differences in mind. By the end of this episode, you’ll have heard most of these uses at least once.
One afternoon in 2020, I was sitting on the couch in my apartment doing homework. I was sitting cross-legged with my laptop balanced on my legs. The windows behind me and to my left filled our living room with beautiful natural light as the sun gradually got lower in the sky. My university classes had ended earlier in the afternoon, and I liked to work on my classwork at home rather than stay on campus. At this time, I was living with my older sister and two other roommates in a small house that had been split into multiple apartments. Tayvin and I had been dating for several months, so he was constantly over at our apartment, although he was not in school anymore and did not have homework to do. On this afternoon, I had several projects to complete that captured my full attention, and I didn’t realize how much time was passing.
Tayvin was in and out of the living room, occasionally going into our kitchen to get snacks or a drink of water. This time, as he walked towards me, he stopped in the doorway and said, “Wow, I can’t believe a lighting designer like you loves the dark so much.” Startled, I looked up and realized that the natural light which had filled the room earlier was gone. The sun had dropped behind the trees and apartment buildings across the street, and I hadn’t noticed how dark the room had gotten. We had lost the sunlight for the day. I protested, “I don’t love the dark, I just didn’t realize how late it was,” and he fired back, “I find you like this all the time. You can’t deny it.” He then flipped the switch for the overhead light, and I resumed my homework.
He thought it was ironic because I work as a theatrical lighting designer. Every week, I spend hours doing lighting maintenance, thinking about and choosing colors for the lights, adjusting their brightness, focusing lights to specific areas of the stage, and programming lights for shows, which means saving lighting information for a specific scene in a special computer. He thought that as a lighting designer, it makes sense for me to want lots of light in all situations. He didn’t realize that at least 50% of the work I do is done with most of the lights turned off. In fact, when programming a show, it’s best to start with the theater in total darkness, then turn on lights individually to add to the scene. So I spend a lot of time sitting in the darkness, looking at lights from farther away. As such, working in darkness rarely bothers me, and as Tayvin came to learn, is quite common for me.
This situation reminded me that as a child, I would get lost in a book, or lose track of time while reading, and the natural light would get dimmer and dimmer in my room. My mom would turn on the light for me and say, “You’re going to ruin your eyes this way.” Perhaps this is why I need such a heavy prescription for my contact lenses.
Something you may not know about Tayvin is that he loses things on a daily basis. You just heard his episode about losing his wedding ring. It is extremely common for him to misplace his earbud case, his phone, the iPad, his belt, his wallet, or the car keys. As his wife, I have become his Certified Thing Finder. I subconsciously take note of the placement of things as I do chores around our apartment, and I can often tell him where to find things when he asks. And he asks multiple times a day. I suppose I’m just naturally more observant than he is.
Now, when he lost his wedding ring, this was different. He rarely takes his ring off, and I was surprised one morning to see that his finger was bare. I asked him where his ring was, confused, and he looked down at his hand, equally confused. I racked my brain, meaning I thought really hard, searching my memory, trying to think if I had seen it around the house somewhere. We searched and searched, but we couldn’t find it anywhere. I called a couple of places we had visited over the weekend to see if they had it in their lost-and-found. A lost-and-found is the place a business keeps items that customers have left behind. No luck.
He put on his silicone ring, and we resumed life like normal, hoping it would turn up somewhere. He thinks I wasn’t as upset about it as he was, and he is wrong. I was so sad. It was a special ring that he had personally designed, and it matched my ring in such a beautiful way with the inlaid rose gold bands (inlaid meaning embedded into the surface of the metal). Every time I looked at his hand and saw the plain black ring, I was reminded of the special ring he had lost. This carried on for a couple of months. I started considering ways to get a replacement and surprise him for our anniversary in January.
Then, just a few days ago, I was cleaning out our couch. I hadn’t vacuumed under the cushions in a long time, and there were crumbs and hair that had made their way underneath. As I pulled out the cushions, I saw something glisten in the crevice at the back of the couch. What could it be? I could barely contain my excitement when I realized that it was his ring! I wanted to shout, but our baby was asleep in the next room and I didn’t want to wake her. So I quickly walked into the other room, got down on one knee, and presented it to him. I even jokingly asked if he would marry me.
We had lost hope of ever finding his ring again. But we had a happy ending anyway. And I still hold my title as Certified Thing Finder.
So, while Tayvin loses things around the house, I lose a lot of things too: time, patience, and other things you can’t hold in your hand. I also occasionally lose the car keys. I guess this is what makes us a good match for each other: we always try to find the things the other has lost.
Okay, let’s take a closer look at today’s word: lose.
I told you in the warm-up that lose does a lot of work in English. Let’s look at how many different ways it showed up in today’s story.
The most concrete use is the one you know: to lose an object. Tayvin lost his wedding ring. This means the thing existed, you had it, and now you don’t know where it is. It is physically gone from your awareness. This often creates problems and negative experiences, for example, not being able to leave on time because you lost the car keys.
Then there are the uses that involve time and attention. I said I got lost in my homework, meaning I became so absorbed in it that I stopped noticing anything else. I lose track of time when I’m completely focused on something. In the story, I also described getting lost in a book as a child. In English, ‘getting lost in’ something is almost always a positive experience, one that people want to have. It means deep, absorbing focus. You lose yourself in music. You lose yourself in a good film. The losing is not a problem, it is the point.
Then there are the uses that involve emotions and states of mind. You can lose patience, meaning you have been patient for a long time and you can no longer be patient. You can lose hope, meaning you believed something was possible and now you no longer believe it. I said in the story that we had lost hope of ever finding the ring. The hope did not go somewhere. It simply faded away. This kind of losing is often gradual, not sudden.
What I think is interesting is that this word applies to physical and non-physical things. It is possible to lose things like time, patience, and other things you can’t hold in your hand. These are not objects. They are states of being. You cannot pick up patience and put it in your pocket. But in English, we talk about losing them as if you could.
So what connects all of these uses? In every case, something was present, and now it is absent. Whether it is a ring, your attention, your patience, or your hope: to lose something means the gap between having and not having. English uses one small word to describe all of those gaps.
So here is your challenge before the next episode: this week, pay attention to how many times you hear or read the word lose. Count the uses. And notice each time, what exactly is being lost?
And that’s all from me. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. I’ll hand you back to Tayvin now. Until the next pot.
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72 expressions from both seasons, with the story behind each one.