No Accounting for It

From the forthcoming Final Approach

I don’t know when I first began to consciously attempt to understand life. Perhaps it has always been a part of me, but certainly it has been true in my latter years. It’s natural, I suppose, as we age and begin to perceive that the exit door seems closer than it used to. There is no way we can actually do that. Understand life, that is. We won’t know for sure until we no longer are part of it. Then, it may no longer matter. In any event, we seem to spend a lot of our more introspective moments attempting to understand that which cannot be understood. So, we try to use metaphors, and similes and analogies.

“Life is just a bowl of cherries,” someone once claimed. Erma Bombeck challenged that with her book, If life is a bowl of cherries, why am I in the pits? Shakespeare said that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” I’ve been thinking about those sorts of things, lately, and had a horrifying thought. Some of it comes out of the judgmental portions of the Old Testament, I suppose, but the thought that gave me pause was this: is life, in truth, a double-entry accounting system?

While a student at dear old Iola High School, I was required by our ineffectual General Business teacher, Miss Ruby Lee Nelson, to attempt to learn and understand double-entry accounting. Never was one of God’s female creations less worthy of the name Ruby, than was poor Miss Nelson. She was the quintessential “old maid” school-marm, inhibited and ineffective as a teacher. Tall, skinny, angular, her nature seemed as pinched as her face. She wasn’t harsh, and attempted to be pleasant. But she was one of those people who seemed to want to have a personality, but didn’t have a clue as to how to do so.

She would stare at us through undersized spectacles as she anaesthetized us with her monotonic, too-quiet voice, attempting to explain topics that were of no interest to anybody, possibly even her. My transcript tells me I was required to endure two semesters under her tutelage, and that I managed to memorize and regurgitate sufficiently well to get an A both semesters. I apparently was able to feed back to her what she had fed us. But I did not learn double-entry accounting. That came many years later.

At some point rather early in my TI career, I decided that I should take an accounting class that was being offered as part of an in-house training program developed by TI. The courses were taught by professors of the University of Dallas, via closed circuit TV to monitors in a classroom set up at the building where I worked. I have no memory of what possessed me to take the course. It just seemed to be something I should do. It was a fortuitous decision, as the course was most valuable to me when we started Preston Trail Audio, and later, HomeTech.

When the course first began, I could seem to find no more rationality to double-entry double-talk, as explained by the U of D professor and the textbook we were assigned, than I had been able to grasp from Miss Ruby Lee. Assets and liabilities, I was familiar with. My college degrees were assets, and my limitations in advanced mathematics were liabilities. But how did that relate to accounting? Debits and credits were another story. The way the professor explained them was in no way consistent with my understanding of the terms. Credits were what you got when you completed a college course. Debits were what constantly happened to my bank account.

But in the double-entry accounting system, it all came down to “debits on the left, credits on the right.” You wrote transactions in “journals” and “ledgers,” and put debits in the left column and credits in the right column. Sometimes debits were a bad thing, sometimes they were a good thing. It appeared to depend on...well, I couldn’t seem to figure out, for sure, what it did depend on. Try as I might, I could not, at first, grasp the big picture of what it was all about. But, finally, the curtain began to part, the mist to clear, the fog to lift, the light to dawn...sorry, I’m running out of clichés. I was starting to understand the system, its power becoming more clear in my mind. What I began to realize, about the system, is that it is essentially fool-proof. It doesn’t allow you to “rob Peter to pay Paul.”

The fundamental element, I learned, was that every transaction had to balance. Every asset gained created a matching liability. Every plus had a minus, every minus a plus. If you received some product in a shipment, it increased your inventory. That was good. Inventory is an asset. But it also meant you had created an off-setting liability. You owed the vendor for that product. That was bad. Likewise, in reverse. If you paid off that vendor, that was good. The debt was cleared. You had removed a liability. But you had also reduced your cash. You had lost an asset. That was not good.

And so it went. Each transaction in our business was seen in this double-entry light. Assets and liabilities had to balance, had to be equal. Although I came to see the power of the system as an accounting tool, it didn’t appear to hold up in reality. No matter how we tried to improve our business, to increase our assets, the liabilities always seemed to build faster, to pile higher. We finally had to give up on the business, as so many small businesses have to do.

I began to wonder about it, recently. Is life a double-entry system? Does every experience somehow balance? It doesn’t appear so, at first glance. We have clichés to express our belief that our assets and liabilities don’t always match up:

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

“It never rains, but it pours.”

“Them that has, gets.”

“There’s the haves, and the have-nots.”

These old saws took root and grew in an environment where life seemed unfair, unbalanced. Liabilities often appeared to far outweigh your assets.

Many of our old hymns speak to that apparent injustice. One that I like, that seems particularly poignant, is “Farther Along.” Its composer is anonymous, but the song apparently came out of the early twentieth century. The first verse and refrain say a lot about the composer’s view of life:

Tempted and tried, we’re oft made to wonder
Why it should be thus all the day long;
While there are others living about us,
Never molested, though in the wrong.

Refrain:

Farther along we’ll know more about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why;
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it all by and by.

Whoever wrote that, whatever his circumstance, he did not seem to believe that the assets and liabilities in this world are equally distributed. Nevertheless, he appeared to be able, and willing, to be cheerful about it, to live his life in the sunshine and to stake his belief and trust in the life to follow.

As we grow up and begin to experience the vicissitudes of life, it does not take long for us to discover the reality of what our parents assure us, and that is that “life isn’t fair.” Evidence exists at every turn:

“She’s prettier than I am.”

“His parents bought him a new car when he turned sixteen.”

“Why can’t we go skiing in the Alps, like they did?”

We are, indeed, “oft made to wonder, why it should be thus all the day long.” But my problem, rather continually, was that I wasn’t so sure that I was in fact going to understand it all, by and by. And I certainly didn’t understand why it is that there always seemed to be those living about us who were “never molested, though in the wrong.”

The Bible appears to tell us that the double-entry accounting will take place, we just have to wait for the balancing transactions to occur in the life that follows this one. Heaven awaits those who accept the grace of God’s love. Our mansion will be on a street paved with gold. We’ll understand it all by and by. All those who appear to have all the assets, here in this life, who are “never molested, though in the wrong,” will see their accounts balanced, their liabilities entered on their ledgers, in the next life. If we truly believe what we are promised by the teachings of the gospels, then we should be content to wait for it all to balance out.

My problem has been, I suppose, that I am impatient. I don’t want to wait for that. I can see no reason why this life shouldn’t balance out. Why should the “good guys always finish last?” Why is life unfair? That doesn’t seem fair. I would watch as people who had little integrity, and even less character, prospered in ways that I knew I and my family never would and, quite frankly, all too often I would resent it.

Dad used to say, somewhat frequently, “Too soon old, too late smart.” I thought that was sorta cute, another humorous country cliché. But it, like most other clichés, was gestated in the womb of truth. It does appear to require most of our lives to finally begin to understand, and accept, some of the verities of this life. All of which is to say, I’m now beginning to believe that the double-entry accounting system of life may not be totally balanced in this life, but it is more often than we tend to acknowledge.

Our problem, those of us who are oft made to wonder, is that we have trouble recognizing our assets, while lamenting our liabilities. How can we expect our ledgers to balance when we have twenty-twenty vision for our liabilities, and a bad case of macular degeneration where our assets are concerned? Let me elaborate.

We believe we know what an asset is, when we see one. My neighbors appear to have plenty of them. One neighbor’s house wasn’t grand enough, so he tore it down and built a grander one. My house is literally falling down—the foundation has sunk during the prolonged drought, and I can’t afford to get it repaired. He hires a full time Hispanic family to maintain his luxuriant lawn, and I struggle to make my self work in the heat and dust to take care of my own. They use a new tractor, and I use the fifty year old Ford I got from Dad. So, it all seems unfair. The neighbor seems to have the assets, I seem to have the liabilities.

Then, while Colleen and I were on a little get-away to Paris, Texas to celebrate the anniversary of our first date (yes, we actually do that), our cell phone rang. It was our granddaughter, Heather, calling us from Maine. She was wandering around outside, enjoying their first really spring-like day, after a very long winter of excessive snowfall. And what did she want to do, while playing with Blackie, the black cat that adopted them, and Babycakes, their horse? She wanted to visit with Grandmom and Granddad. What is that worth? We are quick to perceive our liabilities, how unfairly life treats us. We see our neighbors big new house, and compare it to our own not-so-mansion.

But how often do we remember our double-entry rules, and enter into the asset column of our life’s ledger that delightful phone call from a little girl half a continent away, who misses her grandparents and wants to talk to them? A few years ago, when she was about four years old, we went to their house for a visit. At the time, they lived nearby, and we got to see them fairly often. As I walked in the back door, and called out, I heard a shriek from the adjoining room. Before I could react, Heather came flying toward me, arms outstretched and still squealing with delight. I squatted down to greet her, and she flung herself onto me, squeezing my neck.

I’ve thought about that little scene, numerous times since. I’ve not been able to think of a negative, a liability that I’ve experienced, that could not be more than offset by the feeling it gave me that moment, when my little granddaughter made it clear that I was loved as only a child can love. So, as my thoughts bubble, bubble, toil and trouble their way to the front of my mind, I begin to believe that our life really is a double-entry system. Not just in the “sweet by and by,” although I expect that will be true as well, but also in the here and now.

I suspect our problem is not so much that we don’t have credits, to offset our perceived debits, but that we simply don’t see them. Maybe it’s just that we attune ourselves to seeing the half of our glass that is empty, and overlook the half that is full. But I don’t believe that is all of it. As I have to come to terms with the fact that I am no longer a spring chicken, I also recognize that I am also no longer immature and naive. Aging, and the experiences that we accumulate as we do so, truly do bring with them more wisdom. Our eyesight may dim, but our vision improves. Our culture may believe we oldsters know less, as we age, and perhaps that is true—but what they fail to see is that we understand more. We see our lives, and the things in our lives, more clearly. And we come to value things differently.

What Miss Ruby Lee attempted to teach us, back at Iola High, may not have been intended as a lesson in life. I know I did not leave her class with a heightened awareness of how life brings us a joy to enter into our life’s ledger, for each of the sorrows we experience. But her double-entry accounting system, that I finally came to understand and appreciate, has developed into a good metaphor, a way of looking at life, that might have surprised her as much then, as it has come to do for me, now.