Dumbing It Down

That is where the chapter of my life began to bend. Not dramatically, not with music or announcement, but quietly, in the way many young lives bend after a door closes and no one quite knows what to say. I did not choose shearing because I had discovered my grand destiny among the bales. I moved toward it because it offered work, exhaustion, usefulness and the blessed absence of too much explanation.

I did not know then that the contradiction would become useful later. I did not know I would spend decades walking into rooms where people needed the very things no school number had managed to value properly: judgement, speed, pattern recognition, blunt honesty, controlled impatience and the ability to translate chaos into something another human being could act upon. I did not know that the same mind I had packed away in the sheds would eventually become the thing people followed, even when they did not always understand what they were following. At the time, I only knew the dream had gone, the money mattered, and the day’s work would not wait for me to become a more coherent person. Coherence, like university, seemed to belong to people with more time available.

So I went where the work was. I went because the sheds stopped and started, because Christmas ended, because swimming lessons needed instructors, and because earning had become the shape of adulthood before living had introduced itself properly. I went because stillness would have asked more of me than motion did. The strange thing is that life taking hold can feel almost like purpose for a while, especially when every day arrives with something that needs doing.

Yet it was there that the practical doorway opened. Not into a world of numbers, as I first imagined, but into a world where numbers became the last honest witnesses after everyone else had finished explaining themselves. It was there I began to understand that accounting was not about adding up columns so much as reading the damage, the hope, the avoidance and the ambition that had produced the columns in the first place. That understanding did not arrive all at once, and it certainly did not arrive on the day I was lost in Sydney with a Gregory’s photocopy, but the first clues were already being placed in my hands.

Even a decent room still has walls, and the age difference meant I was always adjusting the volume. I could not speak exactly as I thought, because the full thought often arrived too quickly and carried too much force. I had to slow it down, dress it up, cut off the branches, and sometimes attach a joke to the front like a little bell on a cat. That is not a complaint so much as an admission, because I was not always easy, and a fast mind can be impatient in ways that do not become wisdom merely because the conclusion happens to be correct.

What bothers me is not that I was denied a guaranteed triumph, because no such thing existed. What bothers me is that I never properly got to ask the question when the answer would have been fairest. That is why St Thomas carries both warmth and ache in memory, because it was a gift, a release, a place to belong, and a stage where I could be young, useful, cocky, funny and occasionally bloody difficult with enough wickets to excuse the inconvenience. It was also the place where a larger sporting possibility was converted into a smaller but survivable one, and somewhere underneath the laughter and the scorebook was the knowledge that survival had already made one selection on my behalf.

That is the part achievement stories often leave out. They tell you the age, the title, the growth, the office, the number of staff and the upward curve, as if success is a graph that explains itself. They do not always tell you about the careful voice, the swallowed warning, the edited thought, the private anger, or the exhaustion of proving that the chair you are sitting in is not a mistake. The graph may move upward, but the person inside it can still be lying awake wondering whether tomorrow’s room will require the full mind, the softened version, or something in between.

I did not say all that to Brian. By then I had learned that not every full thought needs to be let loose on a back porch. I probably smiled, made some dry remark and let the conversation move on, which was its own kind of maturity. But I remember the feeling. The number that once had to be hidden no longer needed protection. It had survived the counting back, and so, in its own way, had I.

I can still see that prospective client in the office, another folder on the desk, another story of being unheard, another small number in a long production chain. I can still feel the old impact forming in my forehead, the brick wall waiting patiently as brick walls do. The room wanted accounts, tax returns, structures, bank reports and neat answers, because that is what the room thought accounting was. What it really needed was translation, and once I understood that, I could not unknow it.

To divert from it would have felt like failure, even when common sense might have suggested that survival also deserves a vote. To become less careful, less honest, less committed, less willing to warn, less willing to translate, and less willing to protect people from the wall would have meant admitting that the room had won. So I stayed with the values, even when the invoices did not follow, even when the hours disappeared unrewarded, and even when the advice returned to me later as wreckage. That may have been noble, and it may also have been foolish, but most likely, as with most things in my life, it was both.

I sat there waiting because that had become part of the job too. I waited for the next question from the liquidator, the client to ask what would happen now, or another person who knew better to discover that knowledge and certainty were not the same thing. I waited for the next message to appear on the screen with panic tucked politely behind its words, asking whether I could take a look, speak to someone, find an alternative or fix what remained. Each time it arrived, I knew I would open it, gather the records, apply the law, trace the decisions and do whatever could still be done.

Entrepreneurs will always wear rose-coloured glasses, and perhaps they need to because very little would be attempted without some willingness to believe in a future others cannot yet see. The danger lies in mistaking those glasses for clear vision, allowing rose tint to turn possibility into inevitability, enthusiasm into evidence and turnover into profit. There will also always be another Jones who appears to be doing better, with the larger business, the cleverer structure, the newer vehicle and an accountant who apparently lets him do anything he likes. His debts, unpaid suppliers, tax arrangements and private fear will remain outside the story, while the visible success is passed around and polished a little further. Someone listening will begin to wonder why the same advantage has not found its way to him.