Dr. Carolyn Lee reflects on a different cliché each week. Recently, in her blog, “Cream of the Crop,” she discusses the idea of greatness, and whether or not it is something you should be setting your sights on. This week Carolyn explores the cliché, what you see is what you get. 

Learn more about Dr. Carolyn Lee on her biography page or investigate 29 more clichés in her latest book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live by. 

What You See is What You Get

The Quaker boarding school where I taught was situated in the middle of six hundred acres of Pennsylvania farmland.  One afternoon I passed out sheets of manila paper to the members of my junior English class and asked them to look out the window and draw what they saw.  I was interested in their ability to find details in the panorama out there. I hoped their drawings would be very different from each other and that they would lead to a lively discussion about ways of seeing, ways of responding to visual stimuli. From the window of that classroom, we could see tilled fields and fluffy clouds; there were barns and silos, a long, wooden fence, a nearby flower garden, a wheelbarrow full of dirt, and, on that particular day, about a quarter of a mile away, a small herd of Holsteins.   

The students spent a few minutes gazing out the window and considering what parts of the bucolic scene they wanted to include in their drawings, then picked up their pencils and attempted to record their choices. When they finished, I collected their efforts, and here’s what was so interesting about what they did.   

There were lots of flowers and trees and dirt-filled wheelbarrows; a few students included a barn or a silo. But all but two of the participants in this exercise drew one or more cows. And each little cow they drew had four tiny little legs and two little bitty ears and a wee little tail. Some of them even had miniscule dots for eyes.  Now, I ask you, can you see a cow’s eye from a quarter of a mile away?  No, you cannot.  What does a Holstein look like from the distance of a quarter of a mile?  A small, white blob.  Not one student drew blobs.  They each drew tiny four-legged cows. 

So were those students who drew cows drawing what they saw?  No, they were drawing what they thought they saw.  Or what they had seen in the past.  Or what they believed was out there.  Or what they understood about “cowness.”  In the discussion that followed, we agreed that perhaps seeing is a bit trickier than we thought.  Maybe it requires practice, even talent.  

It would be impossible to overstate the part that seeing plays in our lives.  Teilhard De Chardin went so far as to say, “The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.”  Certainly, it’s fair to say that much of who we are is the result of what we have seen.  And it should be added that much of what we have seen is the result of who we are.  Anais Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  So, seeing, like all the other components of interpersonal communication, is not as simple and straightforward as it might, at first, seem.   

“What you see is what you get” is a way of indicating that something is exactly what it appears to be.  But it might also be an incentive for us to think about what we get from what we see.  A few years ago, I was standing on a hillside not far from Kenmare, Ireland, looking out over emerald green fields and stone walls.  The sun was shining, the sky was bright blue, and black-faced sheep were grazing in the distance.  I was suddenly struck by what a privilege it was to see such a thing.  And it occurred to me that it was my responsibility to see it as well, as thoroughly, as I possibly could.    

Years ago, I scribbled into my book of quotations a couple of lines from a poem by John Moffitt: “To look at any thing, if you would know that thing, you must look at it long.”  It’s a struggle, these days, to look at anything long.  We either don’t have time to look long or we have too many things competing for our attention, or we simply don’t have the patience for lengthy looking.  We experience so much visual stimuli every day that giving our full attention to anything requires an ability to focus on some things and tune out others.  We have learned to disassociate ourselves from our surroundings, to mentally distance ourselves from what is happening around us.  Maybe it would help if we never went anywhere without a pair of binoculars hanging around our necks.  That was the answer for a naturalist who wrote this:        

“With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into “the field,” without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip begin? Whenever we start paying attention.”

So we must be ready to see, and our seeing must be intentional.  It is a developed skill.  On occasion, it can even be elevated to an art form.  The challenge is to pay attention.  Then we must distinguish between what we see and what we think we see, what we have seen in the past, and what we believe is out there.  And we must remind ourselves that we cannot see a cow’s eye from a quarter-of-a-mile away. 

Want to Read More? 

Check out Dr. Carolyn Lee’s blogs on her website, she features a new cliché each week or you can order her new book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live By. Want to know more about the woman behind the words? Read more about Carolyn here. We hope you enjoyed this article learning more about the cliché, what you see is what you get.