“Nothing is as important as we think it is at that time,” Jigneshbhai said, while sipping his coffee. At that time, the double chocolate muffin in our mouths was the most important thing for Swami and me.
“Something we think is very important is routine work for someone else,” he continued while we chomped.
For a moment, Swami and I had the same thought. We wouldn’t mind if this muffin were routine for us.
But we realised that Jigneshbhai was on to something serious. So Swami was the first to speak. Or ask, as usual.
“Like what?” he probed.
“Like the candidates I met yesterday at my office for an interview,” Jigneshbhai replied.
“What about them?” Swami asked, gulping some coffee. Even I wasn’t able to place it in context.
“For each of them, this interview was the most important thing at that time. They must have prepared for it. They must have been tense about it before and even after finishing it,” he said.
“But for me, it was routine work going through all of them in a day. And then selecting one of them,” Jigneshbhai explained.
That lit a bulb in Swami’s head.
“Oh yes,” he exclaimed. “When we went for my son’s college admissions last month, I felt the same. We fiddled with the documents, we checked the timings, location, and everything else to make sure we got it right. We felt like it was the most important thing for those few days,” Swami said.
Then with a pale face, he added, “But once we reached the institute, we saw that, for the staff out there handling admissions, it’s a routine thing. They just asked me and the other parents to sit separately and put my son through a series of steps in the admission process, one by one. They admitted 49 students in less than 4 hours.”
“The same happened when I admitted my father to the hospital last month for an ailment,” Jigneshbhai said, remembering his ordeal. “While I was running around getting stuff done and my father was tense, for the nurses and doctors in the hospital, it was routine, just another patient. I could see them smiling most of the time, and sometimes, even bored.”
I got it. Both my friends Jigneshbhai and Swami had ample experience on getting tense about something (which I admit was a rarity for Jigneshbhai and routine for Swami!). And both of them had found that it was routine for someone else. But both Jigneshbhai and Swami didn’t stop.
“I went with a friend the other day to the city civil court. What was an important case for him was one of the many hearings of the day for his lawyer. That lawyer just ran from one hearing to another talking to clients and judges as if it were all in a day’s work for him. And for the judge, it was even more mundane. He listened to lawyers on both sides and routinely disposed the case in five minutes,” Jigneshbhai said, with a tone of dismay.
“Forget patients and lawyers. When I went to Varanasi, I saw that even funerals were routine for some people at the ghats,” Swami interjected in excitement.
Hearing that example, Jigneshbhai rolled his eyes. Tact and timing in talking was not Swami’s strong point. The point was made, we all got it.
Something important for someone can be routine for others. So what next? I wondered. Swami had the same thought.
“So what about all this? Why did you bring it up?” he asked.
In a plain voice, Jigneshbhai said, “Well, just thought it might be useful to reverse roles mentally. It helps slow down and calm our nerves, especially in the heat of the moment, I thought.”
Got it. Finally. Mental reversal of roles, I remembered. Useful mental model, I noted.
That’s when the wealthy old man appeared out of nowhere. He tapped us and said, “The reversal of importance is especially useful when there are reversals in life.”
***