“There are some things you just can’t make better,” Swami remarked while sipping his coffee over the double chocolate muffin.
For a moment, Jigneshbhai and I thought he was referring to the exceptional muffin and coffee. We stared at each other and nodded in agreement that it’s tough to better that.
But he wasn’t referring to that, we reckoned soon.
“Some things remain bad, however hard you try,” he continued.
“Like what?” Jigneshbhai enquired.
“Hmm.. Well,” Swami thought about it before answering that. “Like my job and my boss situation. Raichand and his problems just don’t get any better,” he clarified in a sombre tone.
Jigneshbhai looked at Swami and me.
“And?” he asked.
“And what? Isn’t one bad boss enough?” he revolted. And on second thought, he added, “If you want another example, you already know about my sugar and prediabetic condition.”
“You mean the edge of prediabetic?” Jigneshbhai chuckled.
“Yes, if that’s what you want to call a serious health problem,” Swami sulked.
Swami had this habit of bringing up and exaggerating his health problems, as an excuse for everything going wrong in his life. He had done this many times over the years. Jigneshbhai and I knew this. Jigneshbhai never took them seriously.
Jigneshbhai continued sipping his coffee while Swami continued his rant.
“For all your talk of optimism, there are some things you really can’t make better,” Swami concluded, his opinion cast in stone.
For a few minutes as usual, there was some silence.
“Tell me one thing,” Jigneshbhai broke the silence this time.
“What?” Swami asked with a scowl.
“Can you make the situation worse?” Jigneshbhai asked.
That surprised both me and Swami. He had an astonished look on his face.
“Worse? Why would I want to make an already bad situation worse?” Swami asked.
“No, I am not asking you to make it worse. I am just asking you – if you wanted to – could you make it worse?” Jigneshbhai clarified, persisting with his question.
Swami and I pondered over it. The answer was plain and clear. One could always make things worse.
“Well, yes. I could make it worse if I wanted to. But why would I want to make it worse?” Swami murmured with hesitation.
“No, don’t make it worse. But tell me how you could. How could you make things worse, let’s say at your office and with your boss?” Jigneshbhai probed with eager excitement.
“Well, if I had to, I could stop going to work. I could refuse to follow his orders,” Swami replied. I could sense that his face almost lit up at the prospect. “I could, well, for all you know, bang Raichand on his head with that vase on his table,” Swami got really creative on making things worse. I could see a smile of satisfaction on his face, as he imagined the vase break on Raichand’s head.
“Good, you came up with three ways,” Jigneshbhai smiled.
“And what about your prediabetic sugar? That is on the edge,” he teased Swami again. “How could you make that worse?”
Swami had creative ideas on that too.
“Well, I could eat these muffins all day,” he said. “I could stop my morning walk. And I could stop my medication,” he added.
“Three more ways,” Jigneshbhai smiled again. “By the way, what medication?” he suddenly asked.
“Some overall wellbeing and homeopathic…,” Swami began.
Before Swami could go into any further details, Jigneshbhai stopped him. “Ok, fine. Let us get the details some other day,” he said.
“So three ways to make things worse for each of the bad situations? Not bad,” Jigneshbhai remarked, coming back to the topic.
“Well, so what’s the point?” Swami asked, losing his patience.
“Hmm. The point is this. If you could make things worse if you wanted to, then you can probably make them better, if you wanted to,” Jigneshbhai said. “You probably have more power than you think.”
Swami and I pondered over what Jigneshbhai said. Maybe he had a point, I thought. But Swami wasn’t convinced.
“Just because you can make something worse, it doesn’t mean you can make it better,” Swami argued.
Jigneshbhai nodded and said, “Perhaps. Making things worse is always easier than making them better. Making it better is tougher, I agree.”
Swami munched into his muffin for a few silent moments.
“But it is not that tough, now that I think about it,” Swami mused as he gulped down a few sips of his coffee.
Jigneshbhai broke into a smile on listening to it. “I was looking forward to hearing that,” he said. “Even if you can’t change anything, you can change how you think about it,” he added.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Swami remarked with a smile.
It was at that time that we heard Deja bark from the adjoining table. Swami fetched a pen and paper in a hurry and wrote what Deja said.
“You have more power than you think; For better or worse, things change in a blink.
Even if you can’t change anything external; Within your mind you can, it’s all internal.”
Swami and I pondered over what Deja had said.
While Raichand and the prediabetic situations still remained the same, Deja had definitely changed Swami’s mood, and therefore, our mood too, from bad to better.
At least, it didn’t get any worse.
***