By L.D. Kirklin
ldkirklin.com
Picture it … Sicily, 1922…
If you have ever watched the sitcom The Golden Girls, you’re probably smiling or chuckling right now at the opening phrase. Actress Estelle Getty skillfully portrayed the iconic character Sophia on the mid-80s show about four mature women sharing a house in Florida. Sophia, the ‘mother’ of the group, was full of advice that she often gave by sharing stories from her young life in the Italian region of Sicily. She would always start her story by asking someone to “Picture it…”
Sophia used words to create a picture, albeit often an unlikely one with lots of color and flare. Just like Sophia’s story created a picture, pictures often create a story, and can be, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words. That saying doesn’t mean that pictures are expensive or that words are without purpose, it simply means that pictures can often clarify where words tend to complicate. What happens though when we can’t see the whole picture?
I have heard from the wisdom-filled people in my life that there are always three sides to every story; two opinions and one truth. With a picture however, there is no limit to the number of sides to its story. Ten people can look at the same picture and each one will see something different. While the photographer might have had a specific vision when taking the picture, not every onlooker will see what the photographer intended.
In the art of photography, there is a guideline to composition called “The Rule of Thirds”. This rule states that putting the focal point of your image in a certain place within the frame, will draw an onlooker’s eye right to it. While it works in many instances, this rule doesn’t always hold true, because, no matter what you do, people are going to see what they want to see; and often what they see is based on something not visible to us.
Years ago, in a psychology class we studied the tendencies of people. One of the exercises in the study was to have a group of people look at a picture for a few seconds and then have each person write down what they saw. The difference in their answers was rather amazing. If I hadn’t been there to see it, I would have thought each person viewed a different picture.
One person said there was a man feeding ducks in a park, while another said there was a little girl crying because she lost her balloon. A third person said the picture showed two people sitting on a bench having a conversation. Three people. One picture. Three different stories. While the picture included each person’s description of it, each person had looked at a different detail, and thus the picture said a lot more than what each person saw.
We could guess that the first person valued acts of kindness. Maybe the second was dealing with pain and loss. Perhaps the third person was lonely and longed for meaningful conversation. While such guesses could be right, it’s not possible to know, because much of a person’s story exists in the part of the picture we don’t see.
I recently watched a video that showed a young boy throwing a tantrum in a restaurant. The people around gave annoyed glances and some made negative comments. The video then faded to a scene that occurred fifteen minutes before the first one. The second scene showed the mother and boy in the office of a social service worker. The worker told the new foster mom that the child had suffered extreme abuse and just needed to be loved. The other people in the restaurant didn’t see that part of the picture, but they reacted based on the part they did see.
The truth is, not everyone is a Sophia. Most people are not going to ask us to “Picture it” and use their words to set the scene for us. Instead, people are going to act and react according to their experiences. However, when we strive to remember that there is more to the picture than what we see, we can respond with grace and offer back something better than what we received.
When we get cut off in traffic, grace says, “it must be an emergency”. When someone is unkind to us, grace says, “that person must be having a bad day.” While grace doesn’t excuse poor behavior, it allows us to react with kindness when our imperfect emotions are provoked by the imperfection of others – and there’s a lot of power in that!
So, if we can’t “Picture it”, let’s be sure to “Grace it”, because a picture might be worth a thousand words, but grace is priceless!
Never underestimate the power of perspective!
