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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Emilee O’Leary, I am a big fan of the NWSL, or the National Women’s Soccer League, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned after taking a picture of a dandelion field.

Fun Fact

Today’s word of the day is OBVIATE. Obviate is a verb meaning to remove, as in remove a need or remove a difficulty. In many usages it can also imply a means to avoid or prevent. For example, wearing your seatbelt while in a car can obviate serious injury in the event of an accident. Since Americans are slowly butchering the English language, this word has gradually dropped in popularity and proper usage in the past century. So, people, let’s bring back the word! Find a way to use obviate in a sentence every day.

In the words of Cicero, “The precept, ‘Know yourself,’ was not solely intended to obviate the pride of mankind; but likewise that we might understand our own worth.”

View From Down Here

When I tell people that I’m an introvert, I’m often met with skepticism. For an introvert, I’m not shy. I’m actually pretty outgoing. However, being an introvert or extrovert doesn’t mean outgoing or reserved; but it is more unusual to meet a shy extrovert than an outgoing introvert. That said, being an introvert means that my primary mode of living is internal; I recuperate by having alone time.

That primary mode of living has been seriously challenged in the weeks and months following the death of my dad. There are so many things, lately, that I’ve had to change because they no longer fit the old way of doing life. Life without my dad has been a continual process of creating new routines for a new way of living, because the old routines are either too sad or no longer fit. And learning how to be around people without getting exhausted or needing to just get away has been part of this learning process, because spending too much time alone has been bad for me of late.

When I first started realizing that I was actually feeling better when I spent more time with people than when I tried to recuperate alone, it worried me a little bit. I’ve always cherished my alone time… sometimes to a fault. It took until I was on a run recently that I realized why it was I felt better around people than when I was alone. And it all started when taking a picture of a dandelion field.

One of my favorite types of pictures to take is from ground level. The picture I used as the banner for this blog post is one such picture, and I’ll explain it in detail later if you did not access this podcast through Facebook or the website. Angles from the ground are so interesting to me. Taking a picture through blades of grass or tilting my phone up from the sidewalk to take a picture of the Rockefeller Center, they’re all just interesting vantage points to me.

Let me explain three photos to help further clarify what I’m talking about. If you’re interested in seeing the actual photographs, I’ve put them in the blog post for this episode.

The picture that prompted this episode is one I took while on a run. I ran past a park that was covered in dandelions. I run without my glasses on, so when I saw the park come into view, it mostly looked like a spattering of yellow amongst a sea of green.

When I came closer to the park and the ground came into focus, I had to stop and have a laugh that even a weed like a dandelion can, in fact, look beautiful. I’ve always liked dandelions. For a weed, they’re so vibrantly colorful. And often you’ll find wild Violets nearby. I stopped running, walked into the field, got down low, set my phone in the grass and held it so the lens was at the same level as the tops of the dandelions, then snapped a picture. There are dandelions all across the foreground growing up out of the grass and it stretches into the background, where you can also see the trunks of trees and picnic tables.

The second picture is the one featured in the banner image of this episode. At my cabin, there is a 4 mile sandy dirt road that stretches from the paved main road to the lot where my grandparents built our cabin. The center of the road gets really smooth from cars and trucks and ATVs packing it down, but along the edges the dirt is not smooth. A lot of sticks and rocks lie in the space between the packed dirt and the loose dirt. This photo is taken on that dirt road from ground level, at an angle that you can see the rough dirt in focus across the foreground, and in the background, slightly out of focus, you can see the smooth dirt and the surrounding wood.

The third picture was also taken at my cabin. On the deck one morning I saw a Daddy Long Legs crawling along the railing. So I steadied my phone on the ledge, focused on the spider, and snapped a picture. In the background, out of focus, are the midsections of trees on the front lawn, the lake in the distance, and a peninsula further out. My guess is that I took the picture around 10 a.m., judging where the sun is. In this photograph, I like how other things on the ledge are also in focus because of their relational proximity to the daddy long legs, like a leaf and the fine ridges of the railing wood.

Now that I’ve given you the background, here’s what I learned.

Instead of telling you that the lesson I learned from taking different ground shots with my camera is tied to the importance of changing your perspective and looking at things from different angles…or me finally taking the opportunity to look at life through the eyes of an extrovert… I want to explain the parallel I made between how I’ve been treated in the months since my dad’s death to how I look at the results of my photograph.

As an introvert, there are a lot of things about interactions with people that exhaust me… such as small talk, repeating the same story over and over, or having to explain something before a thought has fully formed. And while none of these have changed for me since my dad’s death, the manner of my interactions with other people has changed.

Take, for example, the photograph of the Daddy Long Legs. With our smartphones, most of you will know, when you want to focus the lens you tap on the screen where the subject of your photograph is. A small box appears, the lens adjusts, and it makes the subject sharp. This is the best example of how I can explain the difference in how I’ve been treated since my dad died. I feel like people just stopped what they were doing, tapped on me and allowed me time to come into focus. Through conversation they are able to put me and my circumstance into context and understand enough to at least allow the proverbial backdrop of my life to appear blurred around me. They take the picture even though everything isn’t totally in focus.

The lesson I learned as the primary subject of my situation, and an introvert who would typically have been overwhelmed by the attention received, I finally realized the heart of the difference between quality time and quantity time.

Even in a photograph with a blurred background, you are still able to discern enough from the shapes and colors to understand the context of whatever is in focus. For someone unfamiliar with the location it might not be enough to know specifics, but to those who do know… it carries a powerful sentimentality. And that’s really how it is with any story a person tells. A lot of the peripheral details are out of focus, because we all have such different stories so we haven’t all gone through the same things. And even if you’ve experienced a loss like I have, you haven’t experienced it in the same way. But that doesn’t prevent us from taking the photograph, from asking the questions, because there will be things that come into focus for us that might not come into focus for other people.

And in the case of the dirt road picture, where the rough dirt is in focus while the smooth dirt is blurred in the back drop, I also acknowledge that people are getting a very different picture of who I am through investing in me after I lost my dad. Because dealing with loss is messy and sad, and I have been a sad mess a lot. But people know that and are taking that picture anyway.

When I stooped down to take the photograph of the dandelion field, halfway through my run, I realized just how many times I’d run past that same park over the last year and a half. As I pass by, I’ll casually think about how much fun a picnic would be…or how pretty the trees are….or how green the grass is. But when I actually got down in the grass to take the picture, I was immediately reminded that the ground isn’t just green paint! There is so much going on down there. Rocks, twigs, dirt, ants, bark, weeds… All symbiotic relationships that produce the beautiful park.

So it’s not really that I’ve become an extrovert since my dad died, but rather that I’ve come to understand the core of the symbiotic relationships between myself and other people through the experience of people taking unlikely photographs of my current view of the world. Going deeper than small talk can be intimidating or feel like it’s too much to handle at a given point, but I can tell you from this introvert who lost her dad… that what has meant the most to me since his death are the people who are willing to focus on me, whether or not the entirety of my experience will be clear, just because they want to.

As an objective observer of my situation, I learned the obvious, but difficult to understand, lesson that during hard times I can do something as simple as metaphorically take a photograph of someone else’s life. If you are close to someone who is experiencing grief, don’t burden yourself with an inability to understand exactly what they’re going through… all you have to do is show them you love and care for them by intentionally seeking out context for their situation. Let them talk, ask hard questions, let them cry. Do the hard thing and stop to see the view from another person’s ground level.

I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.

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