Dumbing It Down

Those clients rarely appeared in stories about professional heroics because there was no catastrophe to overcome. They simply became steadier, better informed and less surprised by obligations that had always been predictable. Their businesses did not necessarily become spectacular, but they became more honest about what they could provide and more capable of surviving the periods when optimism alone would not pay the bills. They were the quiet evidence that the advice mattered, even when that evidence was difficult to see.

They were also the reason I kept bothering. Enough people listened to justify speaking, and enough avoided the wall to make the bruises from the others bearable. The masses were always the point, not because every client would follow every recommendation, but because good advice distributed widely enough would eventually land where it could make a difference. I never knew in advance which sentence would be heard or which client would finally decide that understanding was less painful than surprise.

The four pillars were still standing, although each unpaid invoice seemed to test what they rested upon. We would continue giving advice before compliance, valuing relationships, speaking with courage and acting as stewards rather than extractors because those principles belonged to Robyn and me before they belonged to the practice. I still believed in them, which may have been both the strength and the weakness, because belief made it difficult to become as hard as the debtors system sometimes required. Every unpaid account felt like a small kick at the foundation, yet abandoning the pillars would have cost something I valued more than the money.

I can see the scene differently now without pretending I would necessarily change the practical decision I made. The client still deserved my attention, and the property still carried consequences that mattered more immediately than whether I attended a discussion group. What I might change is the assumption that only one of those things was allowed to matter, because curiosity did not have to defeat responsibility in order to deserve a place beside it. I could have returned the call, asked another question or allowed the invitation to remain alive beyond that stretch of road. At the time, however, I knew how to serve a client and had very little practice in serving the parts of myself that did not produce an invoice.

The stressors were not always dramatic enough to justify the force with which they accumulated. An email, an unpaid invoice, a warning ignored, a family concern, a client question or a decision waiting to be made could each appear manageable when considered alone. The mind did not receive them alone, because every new input arrived in a system already processing the previous ones. Propulsion came from the accumulation, not necessarily from any single event.

Looking back, I can say I was right, although not in the childish sense that everybody else was wrong and I had understood everything perfectly. I was right about what created the value in Banks Consultancy and right that the value could not be separated from the behaviour that produced it. Clients noticed the difference between being understood and being processed, even when a purchaser believed turnover could be transferred like office furniture. Profits extracted from a weakening base eventually mattered less than the profits no longer being produced, and the four pillars were not branding inventions but a description of how Robyn and I had already chosen to work. Where I was wrong was believing the same truth would become obvious to everyone merely because the evidence was sitting in front of them. Being right did not make me effective. It certainly did not make me easy to live or work with while I kept trying to prove it, and that part of the result belongs to me rather than to MW Lomax.

Depression prefers simple, final verdicts. It says nothing matters, nobody understands, the effort was wasted and the future will repeat the worst parts of the past. Those conclusions arrive with great confidence because depression has never been troubled by the burden of presenting balanced evidence. Writing slows the verdicts down and asks them to show their working. Some survive examination because pain does not disappear merely because it has been analysed. Others weaken once the missing evidence, alternative explanation or sheer absurdity of the claim is allowed into the room.

I can still see the boy in that first classroom regarding a dull roar as evidence that civilisation was ending. He wanted silence because silence made the rules easier to see, and he believed the rules would protect him if he learned them thoroughly enough. Life taught him otherwise, though not completely, because rules, definitions and the line between black and white sometimes remained the only solid objects available in a room determined to become grey. What changed was the understanding that no line survives without interpretation and no interpretation survives merely because the person offering it has spoken loudly. He also learned that some rooms would resist the line because it was wrong, while others would resist it because it was inconvenient. The difficult part was knowing which room he was standing in before the wall arrived.

A survival strategy can remain long after the immediate danger has passed. By the end of my time inside that arrangement, I was no longer softening the occasional thought so another person could hear it. I was continually reducing myself so that systems, seminar models, clients and commercial obligations could remain comfortable. I remained capable, useful and occasionally entertaining inside the room, which made the loss difficult to see from the outside. I was also tired of leaving the greater part of myself waiting beyond the door.

Looking back, I do not regard that period as a failed retirement. It was another stage in understanding that I was unlikely to stop thinking, building, advising or trying to make sense of whatever was placed in front of me. The mistake had been expecting retirement to produce a different mind merely by creating a different schedule and removing the old office. The room could empty, the letterhead could change and the desk could be replaced by a caravan table, but the person sitting there remained remarkably familiar. He needed less pressure, not necessarily the complete absence of purpose.

I cannot claim that writing has provided the release I imagined when the diaries began turning into books. The words mount, the manuscripts accumulate and the stories now occupy shelves as well as files on my computer, giving physical form to thoughts that once existed only as internal noise. There is satisfaction when somebody reads them and understands something I had spent years trying to soften, and there is relief in knowing that parts of the mind have finally been allowed into a room without first being stripped for the comfort of others. Yet the screen still goes dark at the end of the day, leaving me at the desk with much the same body and many of the same thoughts I brought to it. The question remains whether I have released the emotion, moved it into a form I can examine or merely learned to describe it well.

For three hours I stayed at the desk and wrote the first book in which emotion was not merely supporting material. I was not writing primarily about a road, a profession, a business program, a childhood weapon or somebody else’s struggle, even though all of them remained present in what emerged. I was writing about what those experiences had accumulated inside me and about the cost of repeatedly turning that accumulation into something useful for other people. The speed surprised me, but perhaps it should not have, because the material had been assembling itself across years and several books. Once the plan arrived in the early hours, there was very little left to do except follow it.

Meaning may sit less in a final conclusion than in the evidence gathered along the way. There was work, error, laughter, anger, responsibility, love, loneliness, achievement, depression and the repeated effort to remain useful when usefulness seemed the safest role. Some of those things contradict each other, but lives are not invalid merely because they refuse to reconcile neatly. I can justify the conclusion only by admitting the whole structure into the room. The result is less certain than the accountant in me would prefer and more honest than certainty would allow.