A story
One day a high school teacher entered the classroom and announced that there will be a surprise test. Hearing this, students were confused and anxious. "A test?" asked a student. "But Sir, it's the first day of term we haven't learned any new content yet".
Ignoring the question, the teacher began to distribute the question paper with the front-facing down. After handing over the papers to all the students, he asked them to turn over the paper and start the test. To everyone's surprise, there were no questions on the test paper but a black dot in the middle. The teacher told his students "Your task is to describe what you see. You have 15 minutes, starting now."
All the students were stupefied but since they didn't have any choice, they started writing. After the 15 minutes were up, the teacher got up from his seat and collected the papers. Rather than marking, he began to read out loud what everyone had written. People wrote detailed descriptions of the black dot - its size, positioning, etc.
After reading out all the answers, the teacher said "All of you wrote about the black dot. No one wrote about the white part of the paper. I said 'Describe what you see'." "No matter how small the black dot was, everyone focused on it. Everyone wrote very critically about it, ignoring whatever else you could see."
The students still confused. The teacher continued "The purpose of the test was to examine your perspectives, and to help you recognise how you view your world" "We are often trained to focus on a 'subject' regardless of how small, which means we forget the background, the surroundings, and the much larger context." "You all had the white paper to examine, study, and describe, yet you all focused on the dark spot".
He explained "We all have so many reasons to celebrate in our lives, whether that is our jobs, families, friends, our talents, our health, or whatever that is. We witness miracles in our lives every day. However, we simply limit our horizons by focusing on the dark spot. Our disappointments, frustrations, fears, anxieties, things that bother us or aren't going to plan. We invest our time in this 'dark spot'. In our day-to-day life, it can become easy to take the white spaces for granted. There may be so many good things, or people, or moments in our life - yet we continue to focus our energy and time on the insignificant dot-like failures and disappointments".
Though the dark spots are quite small as compared to the things that we have in our lives, they continue to perturb our minds and do not let us think positively. Take your eyes away from the black dots of your life. Try and focus on the brighter sides, and let positivity govern your thoughts.
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