Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  “Really?” she now said. She checked her calendar for any potential conflicts. There were none. Suddenly, her expression recovered, and she seemed wide open to the idea. “It’s your sabbatical. Enjoy it. I’ll go cycling with the ladies here.”

  “When’s your turn?” I said.

  She laughed. “Don’t worry ’bout it. I’m doing my thing.”

  When I told my kids, they didn’t seem to care. I was surprised, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Far from being offended, I took it as a good sign of their growing self-confidence. Maybe things weren’t so fraught after all. Maybe I was able to prioritize my wants without worrying about my sense of responsibility or loyalty to others. The trip was a month away. I decided to go.

  ten |

  It was late February, a time of year when I would normally be fighting the doldrums of winter’s short days and long shadows. Now I was counting my blessings. One morning, I realized that it had been many days since I’d caught myself chewing over past or hypothetical work concerns. A few weeks earlier, in Singapore, I’d noticed a softening of my avid attention on business. Now I’d finally stopped dwelling on my career and work life. With those tensions melting away, the cobwebs were clearing from my mind. I slept through most nights. During the day, my concerns were closer to home.

  I was uneasy about Nava. Of all our kids, she was the one who most missed her friends and teachers in New York. She cried so often about returning home. “What if we had a Skype session with your classmates back home?” Victoria asked one night. Nava nodded through tears and agreed.

  Rita had joined the school basketball team, where she discovered a welcoming and high-spirited group of girls. She had playdates and sleepovers. She still sometimes fought with Oliver, but mostly she returned home from school smiling. When she felt blue, I took her into town for some father-daughter time, which both calmed her and fed me. At bedtime one evening, Rita said, “The kids are really nice here. I think I’m going to like it.” I thought I saw a tear in Victoria’s eye.

  One night, Victoria was on her computer answering emails. “Are Eric and Sharon coming for a visit with their family?”

  I had been back and forth with our Chicago friends trying to fix a date for them to visit with their three kids. “I just locked it down today. April. My brother and his family are thinking of joining us for Passover too.”

  “Pak Chris wants to know if Oliver could participate in Sea to Summit.” Being in Bali hadn’t completely liberated us from logistics and planning. Oliver’s science teacher, Chris, was known to students by the Indonesian honorific Pak, or sir. He was planning a four-day experiential field trip that would leave in April to study the interrelated ecologies of stream, reef, and mangrove in the north of the island. It sounded exciting, but Oliver hadn’t quite jelled with his classmates. Victoria said she wasn’t comfortable sending him off that long with faculty she barely knew. She wrote back to ask for some time to decide.

  I walked to Oliver’s room and heard a symphony of crickets outside, tweeting as if rhyming with the chirping geckos in the house. The geckos lived on the tall ceiling of our home and were impossible to remove. But they left us alone, preferring to keep their distance and hunt for mosquitoes.

  Oliver was on his bed with a night-light, reading one of the volumes from Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series. I brought my own book, downloaded to my Kindle, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. I wanted to be with Oliver, not on a computer communicating with a virtual person elsewhere on the planet. I wanted to be present. I asked Oliver if I could join him. He gave me a preteen half nod. “Sure.” I lay down next to him and turned on my Kindle.

  Pink argued that the working skills required of Oliver’s generation were going to be vastly different from those of my generation. The economic power of computer automation would only increase, and the costs of outsourcing would only decrease. Anything that could be outsourced or automated would be. That included jobs I’d considered to be the domain of highly educated knowledge workers. He predicted that the technical professions my generation was encouraged to enter—law, medicine, and finance, for example—were going to see dramatically reduced monetary rewards. In fact, they were already experiencing it. Getting a good education was no longer a guarantee of anything. On the other hand, careers that involved creativity, innovation, and new ideas—like developing new products, brands, and services—were going to be important, as were those that required a physical human touch.

  Careers that required an interdisciplinary approach also would be critical. He put forth a concept of “symphony,” an aptitude he described as the ability to pull together disparate pieces of a puzzle to find a solution. It was the talent to synthesize and observe the relationships and patterns among unrelated areas, to invent new things by connecting seemingly unrelated dots. Being able to find the right answers to questions was unimportant.

  Drawing, Pink wrote, was a terrific way to develop the aptitude of symphony. As an example, Pink referenced Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, written almost thirty years earlier. She held out the promise that she could teach anybody to draw. “Drawing is not really very difficult,” she wrote. “Seeing is the problem.” And the secret to seeing is quieting the left side of the brain so that the right side is free to explore and express.

  Here was the concept of neuroplasticity, written in 1979 language, well before the subject became popular, well before functional MRI machines mapped the activity of the human brain, and well before Dweck had written about open mindsets, personal growth, and the ability to take on new skills. When Edwards was first published, the understanding of how the brain worked was elementary compared to what has been learned since. Nonetheless, I took in what she had to say. She used as her starting point the notion that the left side of the brain was verbal and rational, while the right side was nonverbal and intuitive. The left side thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters, and words. The right side thinks in patterns or pictures that are composed of whole things. It does not comprehend reductions like numbers, letters, or words but thinks in a way consistent with Pink’s notion of symphony.

  Edwards described the process of learning to see as an artist as shifting from “L-Mode” to “R-Mode.” To me, her language reflected a naïve view of the brain because it implicitly used the metaphor of the brain as a computer. Our brains don’t really have modes, and neuroscience has since moved beyond notions of left and right sides that mimicked the physical features of the human brain, but I understood it was a simple way to get her point across. Through a series of exercises designed to set free R-Mode thinking, she promised to teach just about anybody to draw by learning to see like an artist.

  I glanced over at Oliver. His eyes were beginning to droop. I gave him a brief hug, which he neither returned nor fought. I tiptoed out and glanced at the sequins of stars, so unfamiliar to me not because the view in the Southern Hemisphere is unlike the Northern but because the light pollution of the big city obliterated any view at all.

  I thought about whether the benefits of this sabbatical for my kids would outweigh any downside and had occasional concerns over whether pulling them out of a traditional school environment might cause them to lose ground compared to their classmates. But Pink argued—and Edwards would have too—that removing them from their routine patterns of learning and exposing them to entirely different cultures and schools of thought would make their thinking more open and flexible, more interdisciplinary in their approach—in other words, more in line with Pink’s symphony. Bringing them to Bali might actually open them to more learning and new possibilities.

  Nor was youth a necessary condition for thinking in new ways. Langer would have argued that the brain was much more flexible than Edwards imagined. If my children could learn to think in new ways, so could I. Over the years, through practice and discipline, I had honed a rational and analytical way of thinking. I was as far as anyone could get from a creative artist. So I decided to use
Edwards’s book to put to the test the hypothesis that even someone like me could learn to draw. I would discover for myself how flexible the brain really was. Was it really never too late to learn a new skill?

  I downloaded Edwards’s exercises. The first was to record the baseline of my drawing skills by drafting three sketches: a self-portrait, a portrait from memory of someone I knew, and my left hand drawn with my right hand. When I was done, I reviewed my work.

  All three were worse than awful. To the extent that my self-portrait looked like a human being at all, it was of an obese man twice my age. My left hand looked like a mangled gecko that had been run over on Ubud’s main road. The portrait from memory was nothing I would dare show anyone. Despite my horror at what I produced, I thought again of Dweck’s work and reminded myself not to be self-critical. The point here was not to prove to myself that I was talented but to learn and to test the ability of my mind to acquire a new skill.

  Following Edwards’s next set of instructions, I laid out on the table a copy of a simple line drawing by Picasso. With nothing but a pencil and paper, I tried to re-create Picasso’s work in freehand. The result of that drawing was as dreadful as my previous three.

  The next instruction was again to reproduce Picasso’s line drawing, only this time upside down so that the subject’s feet were at the top of the page and his head at the bottom. I drew it that way, upside down, and when I finished the exercise, I flipped my page upright.

  I was astounded. While it was far from perfect, my drawing was a reasonable replica of the original. I was in awe. I questioned what had happened in the way one questions a magic trick: What was the catch?

  It turned out that copying an inverted drawing diminished my ability to discern features like a nose or a foot and label them in my mind—Oh, that’s a nose, that’s a foot. Instead, I thought in terms of lines, angles, and shapes. I thought too about the relationships among them and how they fit together. It made sense to me that if I’d labeled a body part—an eye, for example—I would have tapped into my fixed notions of what an eye should look like instead of observing, in an open and curious way, the shape, lines, and angles of this particular eye and how those features related to one another. Drawing a portrait wasn’t about some innate ability to draw. It was about observation and awareness. In that way, it was a close cousin to mindfulness meditation.

  I was blown away by the discovery of what I could do. I went on to the next exercise and then the next. Over the next two weeks, I completed Edwards’s course, learning about perspective, foreshortening, light, and shadow. I looked not only at what was in front of me but also what was not, the negative space—the space around and between elements of a subject, like the space between two legs.

  In art, as in meditation, the space between things was as important as the space they occupied, much in the way that, in personal relationships, what was not said was often more important than what was. Focusing on that in-between space in art clarified subjects just as it elucidated thoughts and emotions in meditation. My challenge was to focus on what was real and discard what was imagined. When that happened, paradoxes emerged that had me questioning the truth of what I was seeing. For example, when taking in the three-dimensional world and committing it to two dimensions on paper, lines that I perceived as horizontal really weren’t. Parallel lines appeared to converge. There was more to learn from trying to draw the corner of a ceiling than I could have ever imagined.

  My set notion of what I was expecting to see was at odds with what was actually in front of me. It was almost as if what I saw was an illusion, a construct of my mind. That made sense to me: although I had two eyes, two lenses, and two optical nerves, I perceived only a single image, not two, and that had to be at least in part an illusion that my mind created. We see with our brains, not our eyes.

  Over time, as I continued to draw, I perceived things that had been in front of my face my entire life but had not quite registered. I had never been concerned with light and shadow before. I’d never comprehended the world around me as shapes, lines, and edges. My mind simply processed the information quickly so that I inherently knew, for example, that a shadow on the left side of an object implied a light source to the right. My mind unconsciously and instantly filled in that information.

  One day, sitting outside in our garden, I held up my two thumbs and forefingers to form a rectangle. Sam walked by just then and said, “Drawing again?” I was getting used to his wisecracks.

  I was framing the view of a nearby plant. “If you look at the scene through your fingers, you can visualize the composition more easily.” Its large green teardrop leaves pointed in all directions, some straight and vertical, others folded or twisted in a tyranny of complexity. A gentle breeze blew, and I froze with the stunning realization that seeing the way an artist sees also means capturing stillness in objects that move. I made an ambiguous connection to creating my own stillness by moving to Bali.

  Learning to draw was learning to understand. I surrendered to the reality of what I was seeing. I discovered firsthand what neuroscientists now know: that our senses give us only limited information, and our brains fill in the gaps to create a whole, coherent, and somewhat distorted sensation or image, often with emotions now attached. We invent things all the time. We invent the stories of our lives to fit what we think should be in order to make sense of things that in fact are incomprehensible. That insight aligned with the Buddhist philosophical idea that the self is an illusion, a construct of our own minds.

  On another day, sketching in the garden, I noticed how the color green changes hue over the course of a day, how it varies as the wind blows, how it differs from the bottom of a leaf to the top. Accepting the illusion of sight somehow opened my sense of perception and awareness. In a way, the brain creates a certain deception, a fiction to make a scene quickly graspable to the conscious mind. To capture the differences, I began mixing colors, adding brown to the green to capture shade. When I pulled out a pencil to draw the flowers, I noticed how the wonderful red hue of the flowers plays against the green of the leaves. Red and green simply go together naturally, like tomatoes and basil.

  To see as an artist sees was to accept the world as it is. I knew many people who wanted their lives to be different from those they were actually leading, unwilling to accept the hand they had been dealt, trying to bend reality to a fixed notion of how the world ought to be. I had been a victim of that type of thinking myself. Much of what I’d pursued in my career and personal life was about trying to shape my world into how I thought things should be instead of accepting things as they were.

  In drawing, I found an elegant teaching, grounded in seeing and doing rather than in thinking, about the beauty that can emerge first from becoming aware of what is real as opposed to what my mind imagines and then from accepting or surrendering to it. As I progressed in my art, I also attempted to interpret that information to create something expressive, something that was uniquely my own. Like a fingerprint, any bona fide drawing is unique to the draftsperson.

  Even though I’d let go of thinking about business, I couldn’t help but realize how these lessons could relate to it. Management was often about marshaling resources to shape the world to a vision of what the future could be. Yet often, being flexible enough to accept events and people, flaws and all, for what they actually were could be an invaluable skill, if not for the organization, at least for the manager. Because before you can move forward, you must know the reality of where you’re standing—to accept what it was to be grounded, free of fantasy, free of magical or wishful thinking.

  Drawing illuminated something else. Approaching a problem head on may be the most straightforward approach but not always the most creative or insightful. Complex business deals were like solving puzzles. Multiple stakeholders with interrelated and interacting sets of rights, obligations, needs, and wants often conspired to frustrate elegant solutions. Sorting it all out was creative in its own way, but oftentimes solutions were e
lusive. Without creative solutions, opportunity fails, profits compress, and deals die. Learning to see as an artist sees reminded me that figuratively turning things upside down—flipping a problem on its head—can convert a mindset fixed on how things should be to a mindset open to how things are. Sometimes, solutions hide in plain sight. In a way, our radical approach to Take-Two had illustrated this skill in action. I hoped our sabbatical did too.

  At times, too, the problems themselves succumb to the limits of perception. Especially when viewed from the top of an organization, where detailed information can be hidden from sight, things can become distorted, and problems can remain invisible to the untrained eye.

  I did not have a plan for how I would spend my days on sabbatical. But in drawing, I found a project that held endless fascination. The table at the center of our home became a dumping ground for large-format paper, pencils, erasers, and sharpeners. If I was trying to solve a drafting problem, like how to draw a portrait from a particular point of view, I went to the table to try my hand. When I ran into trouble, I jumped on YouTube to look for instructional videos on one or another aspect of drawing. If I needed a new tool or wanted to experiment with different media, I hopped on my motorbike and headed for the art supply store in an industrial district not far from the center of Ubud. Everywhere I went, I kept a small drawing pad and some pencils with me. They were my constant companions, and whenever I had downtime, I pulled them out. Even when I was not drawing, I saw differently, everywhere perceiving shape, form, shade, and edge.

  My children ribbed me when they caught me squinting to better perceive changing light values like shadows or closing one eye to reduce my three-dimensional depth perception. I began to share with them the insights and showed them examples so they could see for themselves. “Can you see the way the nose throws a butterfly-shaped shadow on the face? Can you see how the sky on the horizon is a lighter blue than the sky overhead?” Sometimes they were interested, other times not. But I sensed they respected my curiosity and excitement about a new world opening up to me.