Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

It's quite remarkable how, even after so many years, the more serious moments of one's school days, long forgotten and rarely thought about, are immediately brought to mind with a startling clarity, with the occurrence of a current incident.

I think there is some associative principle at work here, but I shall delve no further, because this is not a piece about the psychological functioning of the mind. This is about a long submerged truth that used to be hammered home by a caring schoolmaster. (Most of us pupils, I'm sure, saw the 'caring' side of Mr X long after we'd passed out of school, blinded as we were by the wiles of truancy.)

Mr X used to meet us once a week to teach 'values'. He had several novel ways of teaching abstract concepts to 12-year-olds. One day, he walked into class and told us that we would be required to be at our observant best.

He then extracted a blank sheet of paper, about A4 in size, and passed it down the rows for the eggheads, the wizards and the dunces to look at.

"Look closely. Observe, but don't say a thing just yet. I shall ask you, presently," he would repeat, as the sheet of paper exchanged hands. All of us had that gleam in our eyes which said we'd spotted what Mr X wanted us to. After the sheet of paper had been scrutinised thoroughly by 20 pairs of eyes, Mr X asked us, individually, what we'd noticed.

We were united on this one – eggheads, wizards and dunces. We'd all spotted how cleverly Mr X had marked a little black spot at the top right hand corner of the A4 sheet. We told him so.

"Did you notice anything else?" he enquired. "No," we chorused, united again, which was a very rare thing. (Rare, because we all could never agree, even on the 'simple' things, like what was seven times eight.)

"You're all sure? You've had a good look?" asked Mr X. "Yes," we sighed, impatiently. "Didn't any of you notice, then, that it was a blank sheet of paper? That there were oceans of unwritten space?" he asked.

And that, he told us, was the point. We had all spotted the 'stain' on a sea of purity and had failed to see anything else. He went on to liken this 'limited perspective' to human life and how people were prone to doing this very easily, and very often. "But it is a betrayal of your perspective on life if you limit yourself to such a narrow vision," he would say.

That truth came home like an errant sheep the other day when the world reacted to the tragic and untimely death of the former South African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje, in a recent plane crash. Hansie, after all, had brought the game of cricket into disrepute and had had his cricket career terminated as a result.

A few of those quoted, unfortunately, some of them noted personalities, could not see past the 'black spot' on the blank sheet of Cronje's life. But most were magnanimous, choosing to remember the man's positive contributions to the game, one of them even pointing out how his last scoring stroke had been a sixer.

Had Mr X been alive, he, no doubt, would have said that there's hope for humanity yet.