When I was first introduced to the idea of blogging, the first question I had in my mind was “What am I going to write?” I am an Accountant who was trained in counting but not in writing! I tried to give an answer to my own question and voila! I got not only the answers but the discovery of the wonderful world of counting in writing.
Behold! God created everything in 7 days. In the beginning the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. God said, 'Let there be light!', and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness. And the evening and the morning were the 1st day. God made the firmament he called Heaven and it was the 2nd day. God divided the water and dry land appeared and it was the 3rd day. God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and it was the 4th day. God created great whales and every living creature that moveth. God blessed them and said 'Be fruitful and multiply.' and it was the 5th day.
God declared! Let us make a man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. God created Adam and Eve and it was the 6th day. Again he commanded them to be fruitful and to multiply. On the 7th day God rested. (The Bible, King James Version).
As I marveled with the above historical writings, I was fascinated with the fact that God is counting on the days of creation using the basic mathematical principles of division and multiplication, though not mentioned, addition and subtraction were obviously among them. Please take particular attention to how the whole universe and all heavenly bodies, including earth, were organized, moving, and revolving in perfect harmony with one another. Imagine if the distance between the earth and the sun were a little bit farther, all living things will freeze to death, a little shorter we will fry but an exact distance up to the last millimeter and degree, the earth and all living things flourish until the end of times. A simple miscalculation of distances from among the planets, sun, moon, stars, and the galaxies will have colossal consequences. God must be following a formula known only to him because he is an exact God and He accomplishes it by counting which I want to call as the Holy Count.
There were many accounts in the Bible that have been used by unbelievers that God does not exist because they asserted that most of the accounts in the bible were wrong. Take for instance the day when God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge because he will surely die. Everybody knows that Adam disobeyed God but some critics insist that Adam did not die. When I was young and not yet a CPA, I too had the same question but when I learned the art of counting, which I want to call as the mortal count, I found the answer to the mystery. It is because God is not counting at the time He gave the commandment to Adam. He did not say you will surely die on the 1st day you eat the forbidden fruit. He merely said you will surely die. Adam did die, but only after 700 years of existence on earth. God didn’t want to apply the art of counting with Adam because if He did, He would have to give limit to the number of days Adam would exist on earth which would be against His wisdom. When Adam disobeyed God he himself gave the limit to his own numbers on earth. From the day he had eaten the forbidden fruit, he learned the knowledge of counting and from then on he started counting his days. Mystery was solved through the concept of counting. I have the inclination that Adam must have been the first accountant in the world because he is the first human being who learned and applied the principle of multiplication.
Adam did multiply. Every minute, every hour, 24/7 until today, his descendants keep on growing and growing and somewhere someone is counting the increasing numbers until the bomb exploded in an uncontrollable proportion they fondly called population explosion. The explosion was so effective it made it all possible for the Martian, Mercurian, and Venusians, Holy Weak and me to co-exist in these modern days, bringing forth knowledge, inspiration, and happiness. Each of us has its own story to tell about the art of living, the art of loving, and most especially the art of counting rolled into one, called writing.
Depending on how you look at it, but in my opinion, our lives started with numbers. The very first time a man saw a woman, the most important attraction is of course, the girl’s vital statistics 34-24-34 Wow! A body you could die for! Then the guy pursues the girl and the most important question is “Can I get your number? And for you to understand the rest of the love story is to learn the art of counting. You may never know you were conceived in Room No. 45 or Room No 46.
During the courtship stage, the guy will promise the moon and the stars and declare “You are my only one.”, but actually what the guy really means is “You are my only one until I meet my number 2, 3, & 4." When all went well, the guy and the girl get married, and the baby gets conceived and stays in the womb for 9 months. Then, so there you are, you are born!
When I look back during my formative years, I found the art of counting as so confusing because everything else is counted as your first. The first day you learn to crawl, walk, and speak. The first question I remember is “How old are you? “And my answer was 3. The first song I learned was:
I have two hands, the left and the right
Hold them apart so clean and bright
Clap them one, two, three
Clean little hands are good to see!
My First Teacher, My First Shoes, My First Friend, My First communion, My First Crush, and of course the most memorable, My First Experience! Only when I grew up I was able to make a sense out of it and understand that people have been counting all their lives so that when they use the word “First”, they are actually saying that they have their Second, Third, Fourth, and so on. It comes as no surprise to me then, why I started my schooling from Grade 1, then 2,3,4,5 & 6 then 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th year high school all the way to College.
When I was still studying my degree in Accounting, I used to hang outs with friends during free time. Most of them were always bragging about their latest conquests. One would say “I have three girlfriends.” and the other responded with more intensity, “I have more than five and too much exes.”, then they turned to me and asked "How about you Homer?" Well of course, Me, Homer the Great, as always. humble and down to earth, would shrugge off and say “Well, I have only one because after that I stopped counting.” Now I am confused again, I have begun by counting and ended up stopping counting?
The lesson of the story is, there are times counting is good but there are times when not counting is better.
Indeed! Numbers have greatly influenced our lives. At home with my family, budgeting and financial planning is a focal point for our survival. As a Father of the Family, my head is getting flooded with so much numbers, like, the monthly bills, electricity, water, telephone, transportation fares, tuition fees and all other fees that when I perform the process of addition, the numbers come up to gruesome quanity. At work, with the help of the state of the art system they call SAP; the numbers are even greater than at home. Initially I look with the simple number in our local unit and count. When something is not matching, I dig deeper so that the system brings me to Regional Level until my mind would be flooded with gargantuan numbers on a Global level. After sometime, I was surprised to learn that in my effort to resolve a simple issue of number, I have communicated to several places already, Manila, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Houston, and so on as far as the number will take me. Now I come to realize the difference of counting at home and at work. At home, you count your own money. At work, you count the money not your own and worse you can’t even spend it! What a wonderful world of counting!
From the time we wake up in the morning our minds are already consumed with numbers. You wake up because of the noise created by the alarm clock which you set at 5am the night before you went to sleep. Then you hurry up to prepare for work being mindful of the fact your duty starts at 7:00am. If you don’t own a car, you start calculating how much transportation fares you will need to go back and forth the office and home. If you do own the car, you also calculate the distance between your house and the office and how much time you need to reach the office without being late. On the road you start to notice the thousands of commuters rushing up to the office for work, all have one objective in mind to beat the clock which never stops counting the seconds, minutes, and hours of the day. Along the road you also notice the sidewalk vendors, stores, and the mall starting to open up. Each of them has itsr own sign displayed in the board, “Sale 50% Discount”, “Buy 1 take 1 free”, “Check in now, Check out later”. At the office, you want to accelerate the process of counting so that come 4:30 you are good to go, duty is over for the day. At night, when it is time to sleep, you will set the alarm clock once again, for tomorrow is another day.
Initially, I thought that as an Accountant it would be difficult for me to write. I was wrong! I discovered that the skill of an Accountant is exactly what I need to be able to write beautifully because many principles in Accounting are very much relevant and applicable in writing.
The first rule of writing is to be brief and concise. As an accountant I was trained to be accurate, precise, and direct to the point. Balance and parallelism are a must in writing while uniformity and consistency will do the trick for accounting. Redundancy is a double entry while poor grammar and sentence construction are better detected and improved by the process of review and analysis, almost always looking for an answers to the questions How, When, What, Where, and Who. More importantly, Accountants are trained to have an organized thought, a skill very important in writing. It gives us the ability to present the subject in an organized and comprehensible manner presenting our facts from the smaller to the bigger details, from first to second, from a unit to a group, and from the beginning till the end.
An accountant can also be a good counselor when it comes to the matter of the heart. When a girl is confronted with the issue as who to choose from among her admirers, the accountant can always perform the financial profile of any prospective guy. He will simply apply the principle of “three Cs”, Character, Capacity and Credibility. On the emotional side, the accountant can explain to the couple the principle of adjusting entry so both of them can effectively adjust to any given situation. In times of trouble, our concept of reconciliation is the best tool to find harmony within the relationship. When the arguments persist and they are becoming like a recurring entry, the couple needs to apply the concept of 'write off' to get rid of the root causes once and for all. When the argument is about money, an Accountant will surely be helpful in financial planning and budgeting. When there are differences, an accountant can apply his investigative skills and find a logical explanation for the variances. If the difference comes up to three, there is an issue of a triangle. Now the accountant has a bigger problem to solve. How can he write off the other one because it is not balancing?
I thought accounting is different from writing but after doing this piece, I come to know that counting is the same as writing. Both are an art of expression blended together in perfect harmony. From now on, my counting is writing.
Don Dizon
Behold! God created everything in 7 days. In the beginning the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. God said, 'Let there be light!', and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness. And the evening and the morning were the 1st day. God made the firmament he called Heaven and it was the 2nd day. God divided the water and dry land appeared and it was the 3rd day. God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and it was the 4th day. God created great whales and every living creature that moveth. God blessed them and said 'Be fruitful and multiply.' and it was the 5th day.
God declared! Let us make a man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. God created Adam and Eve and it was the 6th day. Again he commanded them to be fruitful and to multiply. On the 7th day God rested. (The Bible, King James Version).
As I marveled with the above historical writings, I was fascinated with the fact that God is counting on the days of creation using the basic mathematical principles of division and multiplication, though not mentioned, addition and subtraction were obviously among them. Please take particular attention to how the whole universe and all heavenly bodies, including earth, were organized, moving, and revolving in perfect harmony with one another. Imagine if the distance between the earth and the sun were a little bit farther, all living things will freeze to death, a little shorter we will fry but an exact distance up to the last millimeter and degree, the earth and all living things flourish until the end of times. A simple miscalculation of distances from among the planets, sun, moon, stars, and the galaxies will have colossal consequences. God must be following a formula known only to him because he is an exact God and He accomplishes it by counting which I want to call as the Holy Count.
There were many accounts in the Bible that have been used by unbelievers that God does not exist because they asserted that most of the accounts in the bible were wrong. Take for instance the day when God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge because he will surely die. Everybody knows that Adam disobeyed God but some critics insist that Adam did not die. When I was young and not yet a CPA, I too had the same question but when I learned the art of counting, which I want to call as the mortal count, I found the answer to the mystery. It is because God is not counting at the time He gave the commandment to Adam. He did not say you will surely die on the 1st day you eat the forbidden fruit. He merely said you will surely die. Adam did die, but only after 700 years of existence on earth. God didn’t want to apply the art of counting with Adam because if He did, He would have to give limit to the number of days Adam would exist on earth which would be against His wisdom. When Adam disobeyed God he himself gave the limit to his own numbers on earth. From the day he had eaten the forbidden fruit, he learned the knowledge of counting and from then on he started counting his days. Mystery was solved through the concept of counting. I have the inclination that Adam must have been the first accountant in the world because he is the first human being who learned and applied the principle of multiplication.
Adam did multiply. Every minute, every hour, 24/7 until today, his descendants keep on growing and growing and somewhere someone is counting the increasing numbers until the bomb exploded in an uncontrollable proportion they fondly called population explosion. The explosion was so effective it made it all possible for the Martian, Mercurian, and Venusians, Holy Weak and me to co-exist in these modern days, bringing forth knowledge, inspiration, and happiness. Each of us has its own story to tell about the art of living, the art of loving, and most especially the art of counting rolled into one, called writing.
Depending on how you look at it, but in my opinion, our lives started with numbers. The very first time a man saw a woman, the most important attraction is of course, the girl’s vital statistics 34-24-34 Wow! A body you could die for! Then the guy pursues the girl and the most important question is “Can I get your number? And for you to understand the rest of the love story is to learn the art of counting. You may never know you were conceived in Room No. 45 or Room No 46.
During the courtship stage, the guy will promise the moon and the stars and declare “You are my only one.”, but actually what the guy really means is “You are my only one until I meet my number 2, 3, & 4." When all went well, the guy and the girl get married, and the baby gets conceived and stays in the womb for 9 months. Then, so there you are, you are born!
When I look back during my formative years, I found the art of counting as so confusing because everything else is counted as your first. The first day you learn to crawl, walk, and speak. The first question I remember is “How old are you? “And my answer was 3. The first song I learned was:
I have two hands, the left and the right
Hold them apart so clean and bright
Clap them one, two, three
Clean little hands are good to see!
My First Teacher, My First Shoes, My First Friend, My First communion, My First Crush, and of course the most memorable, My First Experience! Only when I grew up I was able to make a sense out of it and understand that people have been counting all their lives so that when they use the word “First”, they are actually saying that they have their Second, Third, Fourth, and so on. It comes as no surprise to me then, why I started my schooling from Grade 1, then 2,3,4,5 & 6 then 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th year high school all the way to College.
When I was still studying my degree in Accounting, I used to hang outs with friends during free time. Most of them were always bragging about their latest conquests. One would say “I have three girlfriends.” and the other responded with more intensity, “I have more than five and too much exes.”, then they turned to me and asked "How about you Homer?" Well of course, Me, Homer the Great, as always. humble and down to earth, would shrugge off and say “Well, I have only one because after that I stopped counting.” Now I am confused again, I have begun by counting and ended up stopping counting?
The lesson of the story is, there are times counting is good but there are times when not counting is better.
Indeed! Numbers have greatly influenced our lives. At home with my family, budgeting and financial planning is a focal point for our survival. As a Father of the Family, my head is getting flooded with so much numbers, like, the monthly bills, electricity, water, telephone, transportation fares, tuition fees and all other fees that when I perform the process of addition, the numbers come up to gruesome quanity. At work, with the help of the state of the art system they call SAP; the numbers are even greater than at home. Initially I look with the simple number in our local unit and count. When something is not matching, I dig deeper so that the system brings me to Regional Level until my mind would be flooded with gargantuan numbers on a Global level. After sometime, I was surprised to learn that in my effort to resolve a simple issue of number, I have communicated to several places already, Manila, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Houston, and so on as far as the number will take me. Now I come to realize the difference of counting at home and at work. At home, you count your own money. At work, you count the money not your own and worse you can’t even spend it! What a wonderful world of counting!
From the time we wake up in the morning our minds are already consumed with numbers. You wake up because of the noise created by the alarm clock which you set at 5am the night before you went to sleep. Then you hurry up to prepare for work being mindful of the fact your duty starts at 7:00am. If you don’t own a car, you start calculating how much transportation fares you will need to go back and forth the office and home. If you do own the car, you also calculate the distance between your house and the office and how much time you need to reach the office without being late. On the road you start to notice the thousands of commuters rushing up to the office for work, all have one objective in mind to beat the clock which never stops counting the seconds, minutes, and hours of the day. Along the road you also notice the sidewalk vendors, stores, and the mall starting to open up. Each of them has itsr own sign displayed in the board, “Sale 50% Discount”, “Buy 1 take 1 free”, “Check in now, Check out later”. At the office, you want to accelerate the process of counting so that come 4:30 you are good to go, duty is over for the day. At night, when it is time to sleep, you will set the alarm clock once again, for tomorrow is another day.
Initially, I thought that as an Accountant it would be difficult for me to write. I was wrong! I discovered that the skill of an Accountant is exactly what I need to be able to write beautifully because many principles in Accounting are very much relevant and applicable in writing.
The first rule of writing is to be brief and concise. As an accountant I was trained to be accurate, precise, and direct to the point. Balance and parallelism are a must in writing while uniformity and consistency will do the trick for accounting. Redundancy is a double entry while poor grammar and sentence construction are better detected and improved by the process of review and analysis, almost always looking for an answers to the questions How, When, What, Where, and Who. More importantly, Accountants are trained to have an organized thought, a skill very important in writing. It gives us the ability to present the subject in an organized and comprehensible manner presenting our facts from the smaller to the bigger details, from first to second, from a unit to a group, and from the beginning till the end.
An accountant can also be a good counselor when it comes to the matter of the heart. When a girl is confronted with the issue as who to choose from among her admirers, the accountant can always perform the financial profile of any prospective guy. He will simply apply the principle of “three Cs”, Character, Capacity and Credibility. On the emotional side, the accountant can explain to the couple the principle of adjusting entry so both of them can effectively adjust to any given situation. In times of trouble, our concept of reconciliation is the best tool to find harmony within the relationship. When the arguments persist and they are becoming like a recurring entry, the couple needs to apply the concept of 'write off' to get rid of the root causes once and for all. When the argument is about money, an Accountant will surely be helpful in financial planning and budgeting. When there are differences, an accountant can apply his investigative skills and find a logical explanation for the variances. If the difference comes up to three, there is an issue of a triangle. Now the accountant has a bigger problem to solve. How can he write off the other one because it is not balancing?
I thought accounting is different from writing but after doing this piece, I come to know that counting is the same as writing. Both are an art of expression blended together in perfect harmony. From now on, my counting is writing.
Don Dizon
I love your writing style. you have depth and you are philosophical.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting to read how an accountant tried to make relationship between Accounting & writing through his accountancy knowledge & principles. Good Luck Dear.
ReplyDeletethanks Asim..people like are my inspiration to write. pls continue following our blogs.. there will be more to come. More ineteresting and informative.
ReplyDeleteHomer
This is a good one...
ReplyDeleteIts ok pare...
ReplyDeletethanks pare.. pls continue following our blogs.there will be more coming promise..
ReplyDeleteKabayan,
ReplyDeleteHomer Dizon is really a great writer as I had the chance to read many of his writings before. I am looking forward for another explosion from him that can be put with world classics
Asharaf
Hi Asharaf,
ReplyDeleteYour comment is well taken. Can you please wait for my next writing before you explode?
Thanks...