Nonfiction- 3rd Place

“It was a glitch in the Match.com algorithm.”

That’s what I told my old college buddies when they asked how an accountant like me managed to marry a professor of philosophy. From their perspective, we may seem like a classic case of opposites attracting, but I tried to explain that accountants and philosophers actually make a natural pairing. Philosophers are never short of intensely deep conversation topics. They also tend to be underemployed and underpaid in their profession, so they’re generally cheap dates. In our case, a cup of coffee would fuel conversation for hours. That’s a great value proposition from an accountant’s perspective.

Our relationship was not all sunshine, roses, and enlightenment, however. As I paid our bills each month, I occasionally struggled to understand why she went to school for a decade only to earn such modest paychecks. On the other hand, she struggled to understand how it was possible for me to dedicate so much time and effort to a profession that I had absolutely no passion for. As my accounting career began to grind and stall midway through its second decade, I became increasingly preoccupied by the troubling incisiveness of her point of view.

During one of our informal “state of our union addresses,” we revisited a familiar theme – how we might maximize my happiness as opposed to my income. We were halfway through a pint of black cherry frozen custard, and I was too demoralized to put my funk into words. “Tell me where you’re at,” she said, “and I’ll meet you there.”

I couldn’t tell her where I was at. It would sound like a pathetic Dilbert cartoon or a re-run of The Office. Instead I showed her using the rusty remnants of my artistic talents.

I drew a large circle representing the business world – a conservation of conservatism.

I drew another circle within the first. Inside the vast world of business, I worked in the financial services industry – a convention of conventional thought.

Within the stodgy financial services industry I work in banking. Not banking as in Wall Street banking. That would be glamorous and lucrative. I draw a third circle inside the other two.

I’m in the community bank market, a stodgy subcomponent of a stodgy industry segment where starched shirts are the way, casual dress arouses suspicion, facial hair indicates you’re hiding something, and tattoos are carefully concealed by monogrammed shirt sleeves to guard against the damning impression of impulsiveness, individuality, or youthful indiscretion.

I shouldn’t judge community banks, because I didn’t actually work for a community bank. I worked for the community bank’s back-office services provider. When a stodgy bank finds a business process too boring and stodgy for even their own stodgy selves, it outsourced the process to us. We’re the creatures who run the computers in icy server rooms and crank out bank statements from windowless print shops. It’s the height of depression. I drew yet another circle, tight and small. It doesn’t get much stodgier than this.

But it does.

I work in the accounting department of this back-office firm. Within the world of business, accounting is widely acknowledged for being practically unacknowledgable. I embed another circle, this one about the size of a capital letter “O.” Can it possibly get stodgier?

Yes indeed.

I work smack in the middle of middle management.

Stodgy!

I place a small round dot square in the middle of my concentric circles.

“You want to know where I am at?” I asked. “I reside at the epicenter of stodginess.”

I sulked.

“Depressing, isn’t it?”

“You’re not depressed,” she replied. Then she diagnosed me as only a doctor of philosophy could. “You’re just having an existential crisis.”

As far as existential crises go, mine was very much of the garden variety. I was unhappy in my work and distressed that my epitaph might only read something along the lines of “Husband, CPA, and relatively fun guy to travel with on business.” Woe is me. I wouldn’t even allow myself to call it an existential crisis, not with all the real crises going on in the world. I called it a funk and went back to work.

On one particularly dreary workday, a dark cloud seemed to have descended onto my workspace making it impossible to concentrate. I contemplated how my forefathers were hunters and gatherers, and how I presently found myself hunting and pecking at a keyboard that seemed to be mocking me. The “num lock” key made me numb. The “home” key made me homesick. The “shift” key prompted fantasies of career change. The escape key? I tried it. It’s a liar.

Then I received an email from my wife that put a CTRL+ALT+DEL on my zombie state. She registered me for art class up in Door County, and she couldn’t wait until I got home to share the news. It wasn’t just any class. It was a class with my favorite local artist, whose paintings distilled such intense emotions that a simple stroll through her gallery could induce massive mood swings. I went immediately to my boss’s office to arrange for time off.

My boss was a classic accountant with a quantitative mindset so strong he could fully absorb a book full of numerical minutia in a minute’s time. He sat behind his desk calmly paging through neat stacks of financial reports when I popped in. The walls to his office were pale and decor was minimal. The rectangular space had the visual appeal of a racquetball court.

“I need a few days off to attend painting classes in Door County,” I said.

“Door County?” he asked. “You know, they have free painting lessons over at the Home Depot in Wauwatosa.”

It had been ten years since I swiped my initials on the corner of a completed painting. If I recall correctly, my last effort was a dodgy impressionist portrait that decorated the utility closet of my old apartment. I’m not a significantly talented painter to begin with, and whatever artistic talent I may have had deteriorated after years of neglect and lack of development. As we made our way north through Door County, my wife reminded me that the ideal outcome of the class was not a showpiece for our living room. Rather, it was to see the world anew. I was reminded of this as we wound our way through the country roads to the art school’s campus. The mere prospect of painting had already renewed my appreciation for morning light. The clouds in the sky were no longer white. They were titanium white, and their billowy face had a soft, buttery yellow undertone. Their nooks and crevices were distinguished by soft arcs of tasman blue placed there by some divine stroke of a filbert brush. We were not merely commuting through Door County en route to Fish Creek. We were voyaging through a constantly shifting work of art.

The painting class began with introductions. One classmate explained that she wouldn’t consider herself a professional artist since she “barely covers the costs of her studio.” It was clear that I was way out of my league, yet I proudly announced that I was simply an accountant seeking to rediscover his creative side. This revelation prompted my classmates to rehash the standard battery of creative accountant jokes. “I had an uncle who was a creative accountant. He’s serving 10 years for tax evasion! Waka, Waka, Waka!”

After three full days of painting instruction, I produced a couple of landscapes notable only for their extensive variations of brown – the only color in the spectrum that people seem to feel sorry for. I also tried a few pre-dawn street scenes, but those experiments in light should never see the light of day. Despite these apparent failures, the class was an unequivocal success. I saw potential paintings everywhere I went. I found myself staring at a farmer’s red barn as it was set against green fields and blue skies.

“I wanna paint that,” I said.

“It’ll take some primer and two coats,” he replied. “Have at it.”

The class also had another unexpected but welcome outcome. I began to see my job in a new light. When I found myself obsessing about numerical details and providing financial reports at increasingly microscopic levels of granularity, I was reminded of my art instructor’s challenge to abandon my photo-realist mindset and to think like an impressionist. “If you think every brush stroke is as precious as the next, nothing is precious. Don’t paint every leaf on the tree. Paint in blocks of color. Whether you’re a photo-realist or an impressionist, a tree is a tree when you step back from it.” With that encouragement in mind, I elevated the level at which I provided financial information and asked the stakeholders to step back from the detail to interpret the big picture. That might have been the first time a financial statement was evaluated like a work of art, but it worked. I began to see my creativity as a virtue that gave me the ability to see beyond the obvious, to frame up problems like a composition, and approach these problems from alternative perspectives.

When I look back on that period of my life now, I realize that my situation was not an existential crisis, medical crisis, midlife crisis, or funk. It was just life. It was life unfolding in real time while I maintained just enough awareness to notice it. Unfortunately people with the most acute awareness tend to suffer the most in those notoriously sterile corporate environments. This became increasingly true for me at the epicenter of stodginess. Although my experience at the art class provided helped in the short term, my newfound enlightenment seemed to contrast starkly compared to the dim circumstances of my work life. As I learned in art class, the point of sharpest contrast in a painting often becomes the focal point by default. After years of going cross-eyed trying to focus on the present responsibilities of my job while maintaining an eye for a better future, I decided to make my miscast career the focal point of discernment in an effort to change it.

Several months later I found myself in a job interview with a small all women’s college. They needed an accounting instructor. The college had an innovative curriculum that required the mastery of abilities such as analysis, communication, problem solving, and so on. The most unique of these abilities was “aesthetic engagement,” in which students must demonstrate the ability to engage with the arts and draw meaning and value from artistic expression. As I neared the end of the interview, they threw the curveball question certain to make the typical bean-counter candidate squirm. “How would you, as an Accounting Professor, integrate aesthetic engagement in your classwork?”

I explained how businesses often saw themselves as mere patrons of the arts, and they failed to see how the arts could inform their operations. I used examples of how painting influenced my own work as an accounting manager, and I shared how it might impact students of accounting as well. They bought it!

I’m now entering my second year as an Assistant Professor of Accounting, a position that requires more creativity than I ever would have imagined. My old college buddies don’t ask me how I managed to woo a philosopher anymore. They don’t bother to ask how two professors managed to hook up either. Instead they ask how a student like me (of modest ability and motivation at best) managed to become a tweed-clad professor in the first place. I answer them in the most philosophical and existentially correct way I can. “Everything evens out in the universe. The Yin and Yang. Debits and Credits. Not much higher education got into me, so I got into higher education.”

Judge’s Comments:

“As one who believes in the power of art to enhance life and civility at all levels and in all corners, I often fail miserably in making my case. Perhaps that is because I tend to overload the cannon. The self-deprecating humor in this piece earns the reader’s attention and holds it throughout, but it is the low-key, quietly tenacious way the narrator works the knot of the problem that ultimately enables the piece to address much loftier ideals without losing us in the clouds.”

“A Garden Variety Existential Crisis” is part of a collection of essays that involve myself (a recovering accountant) and my wife (a professional philosopher).

I currently teach at Alverno College. When I am not teaching and writing, I can be found playing with my newborn twin girls named Maeve and Merielle.