The Comfort of Numbers

The day this Blog becomes an organ recital, someone needs to make me shut it down. But truth be told, the aging body has not been kind lately. Alongside my off and on chronic dizziness is a mysterious upper right back issue that like many such things, just came out of nowhere. Not like I lifted something too heavy and twisted the wrong way when exercising. It just appeared. A heating pad last night helped a little bit, but not quite enough. 

 

In theory I understand that happiness doesn’t come from what happens to us, but how we react to what happens to us. Still, what happens has a voice in the matter. In my case, diminishing my resilience and ability to accept with grace whatever comes my way. 

 

But I do know that walking tends to help everything. So after a short day subbing in my school and playing things from my kitchen to the rhyme Davy Dumpling with 2^nd graders, I had the good sense to get out walking in the park. Miraculously, the sun was out after a week straight of fog and that certainly helped lift my spirits. As did writing in my journal, putting the details of my pity party on a page where no one has to listen to it, in the hopes that just saying it out loud and recognizing it— “I see you! Now can you leave me alone?”—might help. After writing, I sat on a bench and finished the book The Phoenix Crown, which was not remarkable, but certainly satisfying. Then I walked a bit, played a bit of cornhole by myself in the public set on JFK Drive and came home to deal with some business matters. 

 

In this case, the business was making and sending off invoices for some of my books that three different dealers ordered.  The sun still out, playing on the leaves of the tree outside my window, my back issue and dizziness somehow taking my advice and leaving me alone for a moment, I find myself feeling great comfort in putting numbers in the Excel sheet and with my phone calculator at the other end of the house, actually adding, subtracting and multiplying them with pen and paper! Using my own brain! Imagine that! 

 

For a brief moment, I wondered if I should have been an accountant instead of a music teacher. Whole days just me and numbers and spreadsheets. Numbers with their calm dispassion. No rolling around on the floor like a couple of the 2^nd graders today or refusal to listen to my simple direction from a 6^th grader, no squawks or squeaks of hyper delight or dismay. Just the reliable 25 that reliably becomes 30 when you add 5 or 5 when you divide by 5. The satisfaction of multiplying the number of books ordered by the price of each book, then adding them all together, then multiplying times .60% (my share of the profits) and seeing if the final number matches the one on the Purchase Order and —lo and behold! It does! That’s all it takes to sit back in satisfaction and think, “Life is sweet! Everything works! Everything makes sense!”

 

Perhaps as an accountant, I’d eventually miss a few hugs, the uplift of music grandly played, the funny perceptions of lively kids. But for today, it was just what the doctor ordered.