On the last lesson of the day, a teacher announced a surprise test to his class. They all replied with a chorus of groans as this wasn’t the sort of surprise they liked to get!
The test papers were handed out face down and everyone shuffled in their seats anxiously. What a way to end the school day!
When the teacher asked the class to turn over their papers, a second surprise – there were no questions!
The paper contained just a single black dot in the middle of a sheet of white unlined A4 paper.
Puzzled, the students began to wonder whether this was an April Fool’s joke but it wasn’t as their teacher asked them to write on another piece of paper what they could see – and that was it!
Yes, all they had to do was describe what they could see on the paper!
They were given 20 minutes to complete their task and when time was up, the papers were collected in to be assessed.
The teacher explained that feedback would be given the next day. Bemused but curious, the students filed out all discussing what had just happened.
The following day, the teacher announced that the papers had all been carefully reviewed but no grades had been given. This was not that sort of test.
The teacher explained that everyone had written about the black dot in the middle of the page. Interestingly, no one had anything to say about the white portion of the paper that surrounded it.
The written explanations of the black dot were not without merit and there were some very creative responses but no one wrote about anything else.
The teacher explained that the test was a way to illustrate how some of us approach life and how we think.
He pointed out that it is easy to get fixated on just one thing (the black dot) at the expense of everything else (the white piece of paper).
In our lives, things seldom run smoothly and when we hit a spot of bother then we focus on this one dark spot and become fixated.
More than likely, our lives will have more than one spot and some will be bigger than others. Whether there is one or a handful, what’s the betting you focus on the dots and not on anything else? Our attention is drawn to the negative rather than the positive.
The dark spot in your own life might be something quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things but that doesn’t stop you from devoting much of your time to it. That dark spot might be very small compared to all the other things going on in our lives, good things we tend to forget or take for granted.
Of course, the dark spot might be something that definitely deserves your attention like an illness.
Let’s say that the spot in the centre of the page represents cancer – that is clearly going to get your attention.
A life-threatening disease is all-consuming, it takes over your thought processes. In fact, there are times when it is only right and proper that we do devote our thinking to the black spot – but not 24/7.
There is still all the other good and great stuff in your life that surrounds you.
I know from the personal experience of incurable cancer that if I was sitting the test, I’d probably end up writing about the cancer and not all the beautiful things that still fill my world.
At least, when I was first diagnosed that is.
If I was sitting the test now, I’d be focusing on more than just that black dot of my existence – my life is made up of so much more than that. The raw experience of coping and managing an illness gives you this perspective.
The white space is actually chock-a-block of things to be grateful for and crammed full of magic moments.
Even in the thick end of a serious illness there are plenty of things we can still enjoy and celebrate.
As a cancer patient, I could focus my time and energy on that dark spot but if I did that, I’d be denying myself the enjoyments life still has to offer me.
It’s too easy to say “Stop focusing on the black dot!” but what we focus on will shape our thinking.
The black dot might still be there but it isn’t the whole story and so it doesn’t deserve our full-time attention. The tunnel vision of dark spot thinking will blind us to the many positives we still have access to. Not everything is bad, even with an incurable illness.
Are you a spotty thinker?
