Learning

Your memory and the way your mind works, combined with a situation, can take you down some odd pathways sometimes. For instance, the other day I was out pointing my camera at frost-covered weeds along a fencerow when it occurred to me that my habit of pointing my camera, with macro lens, at frost-covered or dew-dripping weeds along a fencerow has probably made me better at my job as a medical transcriptionist or medical editor/transcriptionist or “medical language specialist” or whatever title they are conferring on us in lieu of actually fair pay--and conversely; that is, my job has made me better at seeking out subjects for macro photography. In both, attention to detail, looking at the “small” things, is (thinking of various clichés, here: “paramount,” “key,” “the ONLY thing,” etc.).

A little over a decade ago, I left a job in a busy pediatric clinic at a teaching hospital where I had worked for a little over a decade. In many ways I hated leaving--it was a decent enough job, but, more importantly, had transformed me in myriad, mostly unexpected ways. For example, it even made me a better driver. Spend a few years walking rapidly through a clinic with three waiting rooms and a couple dozen exam rooms boiling over with bored and/or hyperactive and/or just plain normal, active kids, and you sharpen your peripheral vision--nobody wants to slam into a 4-year-old who has barreled out of a waiting room into the hallway. That enhanced peripheral vision saved me from barreling into stop sign-ignoring cross traffic on the commute to and from work on at least three occasions that I specifically remember.

In that particular job I worked for 7-10 pediatricians, 4 nurse practitioners, and sort of for 2 social workers, plus had to deal with 50-something residents and every-two-month rotations of medical students, all with their own personalities, obviously. That probably doesn’t seem like much, but to introverted-me, it was a lot, or seemed to be whenever I thought about it (which wasn’t often). One of the nurse practitioners once told me that my job was like being married to a dozen women at a time, which made me laugh because she was so right.

That probably prepared me to handle up to 21 pets (16 cats, 5 dogs) at once--and handling/keeping happy 21 pets at a time probably prepared me for my current job, to some degree. It helped teach me how to pay attention.

Which in turn helped me when I relocated to Natchez, Mississippi--”Deep South”--a few years ago, then when I relocated back up here almost 3 years ago.

I am not a “perfect” photographer, macro or otherwise, was never a perfect office coordinator, will never be a perfect transcriptionist or editor or driver or pet-slave or even neighbor or anything else, but it can be fun to look at how all of those separate “parts” of me have meshed and fed off each other, learned from each other, over the years.

Point is, we all get our “real” education in circuitous and unexpected ways.

This is not news, I know--we all know that we can and do learn from every situation we experience and every person we meet. Sometimes we may need to remind ourselves of that, however.