Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  The next day, I sat with my drawing pad on my lap, pencil in hand, contemplating a flowering plant in our backyard. Victoria said, “Are you going all Gauguin on us?” I rolled my eyes, and she laughed. Among the myriad ways I was unlike Gauguin, I had no idea how to draw the human figure, let alone paint it. Still, Gauguin also discovered art in his middle age. He taught himself just as I was doing. And Victoria did give me the idea to focus on Gauguin-like subjects. After all, I was living in Bali, he in Tahiti. For an American, the similarities were close enough, and for a moment, I allowed the comparison. Gauguin stayed in Tahiti for two years before returning to France and ultimately resided in the South Pacific permanently. I downloaded a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, a fictionalized version of Gauguin’s life. As I read, I fantasized about what it would be like to accept the call to be an artist rather than a businessman, extend my sabbatical in Bali, and draw Balinese models. I wanted to dismiss the thought, but it reasserted itself in my mind, so I let it loiter a few moments longer than I should have.

  I searched the internet for art classes in the area. Mostly what I came across related to art therapy, yet another portal to Ubud’s healing culture. But one class, life drawing, caught my eye. It was being offered at the back of an art gallery on Ubud’s main road, Jalan Raya, not far from my home.

  One afternoon, I stopped by Pranoto’s Art Gallery. It was right next door to Body and Soul, where a sixty-minute massage cost one hundred thousand rupiah, or about ten dollars. Pranoto greeted me as walked in. Already in his fifties, he was a slender Balinese painter. His graying beard was stained from too many cigarettes, his teeth from too much coffee. He cut a figure taller than most local men and spoke, in perfect English, with a purpose. As we talked, I sensed his deep commitment to his art and Ubud’s artist community.

  He didn’t so much teach a class as hold drawing sessions for a group of local artists. I told him I wanted to attend. “Tidak apa apa,” he said. “No problem. Come back Wednesday morning at ten o’clock. Bring your own materials.” The cost was twenty thousand Indonesian rupiah, about two dollars.

  That Wednesday, I arrived fifteen minutes early. Artists trickled in carrying canvases, large-format paper pads, easels, and boxes filled with paint and charcoal. I had a single number-two pencil, an eraser, a sharpener, and a pocket sketchbook.

  A draped chaise longue occupied the center of the room. A single bright lamp hung overhead, and a pot of coffee brewed in the rear of the studio. The other artists seemed to know each other well and engaged in casual conversation. Pranoto recognized me and motioned me to sit. “Anywhere on the floor you’d like. Make sure you get a good view of the model. Cushions are in the back.” I sat cross-legged and waited.

  At ten o’clock, a pretty Balinese model entered the room. She wore a batik sarong, the traditional fabric of Indonesia, tied above her chest. I wondered for a moment why she looked familiar but soon recognized her. She was a waitress at the Bali Buda café, just down the street, where I often drank tea and read the papers. As she approached the chaise longue, the room fell silent. She sat, removed her sarong, and retied it around her waist. My heart quickened at the sight of her naked torso. I knew life drawing meant nudity, but I wasn’t quite prepared for it.

  The model struck a pose and looked at Pranoto for approval. He coached her, asking her to move an arm or to shift her body to the side. Then he bellowed, “Two-minute pose!” Pranoto came over to me. “These short poses are just a warm-up. Throw away your early drawings. Longer poses come later.”

  I recognized Pranoto’s quick drawing exercises. They were meant to encourage Edwards’s shift from L-Mode to R-Mode. Accessing the right side of the brain could not be switched on like a light. It wasn’t like moving from one task to another. R-Mode needed to be seduced to center stage, to be teased and warmed up. Short drawing exercises, like short poses, were one of the tricks of the trade. Even experienced artists needed to get their heads in the right place before getting down to business.

  The silence of the room gave way to a cacophony of scratches. The scraping sounds of charcoal, pencils, pens, and brushes all merged into something less than a symphony. Artists nodded like bobbleheads as they shifted their gazes from the model to their work and back again. I turned my attention to my own work. I felt the tension of staring keenly at a seminude model and could not quite settle down. I fell back on what I had learned so far about art and tried to focus on shapes, lines, and angles. Soon the nudity fell out of my consciousness and was replaced by the business of capturing the human figure in two-dimensional space. Through a series of poses that increased in length up to twenty minutes, I struggled to faithfully reproduce in hard graphite the image of the model in front of me.

  I concentrated on breaking down into components what I was observing. I slowly deconstructed the image of the model in order to understand how I was handling it in my mind. I focused on the shapes of the shadows as they fell across the model’s face and body. I stared at her for long minutes at a time, slowing down my thought processes so that I could take in hidden information.

  It made me understand not only how my mind quickly processed information but also how, in drawings, the slightest mark that hinted at a familiar image would cause the viewer’s brain to quickly fill in information to create the full image in their own minds. A slight vertical mark below a set of eyes would immediately be understood as a nose even though the line on its own bore little resemblance to a nose.

  Seeing the way an artist sees, for me, required me to create space and slow down the speed with which my mind constructed the image. It demanded intense focus. I became so lost in what I was doing that the chatter in my mind was silenced. When Edwards’s L-Mode/R-Mode shift kicked in, the words of my inner voice disappeared. In their place, I could see only what was in front of me and on my page. I was in the here and now rather than some time or place in the future or the past. I fell into it as if into a trance.

  In the 1990s, University of Chicago’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced a concept that he called “flow.” Flow was focused attention at its peak. It’s what happens to artists when they get lost in their work, when they are so focused that everything else, every thought unrelated to the task at hand, falls away.

  When I was in the video game business, flow had been used to describe the deep involvement of players in some games. But I didn’t experience it there because I was multitasking and distracted by any number of emails, meetings, and calls that demanded my attention. But now, simple pencil and paper drew me in. I was focused on the effort, not the result. I had no expectations of myself. What drove me was pure interest, pure curiosity, and pure amazement at what I could perceive simply by being aware and engaged.

  Pranoto called a five-minute break. I wandered the room to see what other artists were doing and what I could learn. I asked questions. Here and there I coaxed a drawing tip. Even though we were all drawing or painting the same model, no two styles or techniques were the same. The interpretations of that model were wildly different from one artist to the next. They reaffirmed the idea that expression is unique to each individual and that raw information, in art and elsewhere, is much less interesting than the interpretation and insights derived from it.

  About halfway through the three-hour session, Pranoto called a long break. I stopped to talk to Leo, an American who I guessed was in his seventies. Leo was a retired philosophy professor who had taught in Edinburgh. He drew in a style that used many short marks as opposed to longer edge lines. He brought his own stool on which to sit, a collapsible aluminum easel, and a tube into which he rolled his drawing paper.

  I asked Leo to show me his work. He pulled out a portfolio. Most of his drawings had a sepia background and were smaller than the large-format paper I had seen him use. I asked him how he got that effect.

  “I draw in graphite,” he told me, “then I scan my work into Photoshop and play with it.”

  I asked what he did with all his fini
shed work.

  “Give them as gifts. If I get invited to dinner, I’ll bring a small drawing instead of wine. My hosts seem to like it.”

  When the break ended, I went back to my cushion and began again. The poses went on until, at one o’clock, Pranoto called, “Time!”

  The hours had zipped by like minutes. I felt no distraction, no need for coffee or a snack. I had been utterly lost in intense concentration. Each stroke of my pencil seemed like the only thing that mattered in the universe. My sense of self—my ego—completely surrendered to the sense of presence in the immediate moment.

  The model stretched her limbs, which must have ached from being perfectly still for as long as twenty minutes at a time, often in challenging poses. I packed up my things and waited for Victoria to pick me up on our motorcycle.

  When she arrived, my fingertips were black with graphite, hers black with mud from mountain biking with Michelle that morning. I complained about the quality of my work and how difficult it was.

  Victoria sat behind me on our motorbike, her arms wrapped around my waist, as we motored toward Sari Organics, a restaurant and farm set in the middle of a rice field. We parked the bike by the road and walked a few hundred yards down a path through rice paddies, where maturing stems swayed in the moist breeze. When we arrived, I ordered a green papaya salad. Victoria ordered vegetarian nasi campur. I told her how I’d felt free of distractions, in a zone so private, so clear, and so deep in focused concentration that there was nothing else in the world to think about but the next mark on the page. I was exhilarated.

  Until I pulled out my drawings. In my best drawing, I had shown the model at least twenty pounds heavier than she was. Her hands looked like claws, and her lower body was compacted to the point that her legs looked like they belonged to SpongeBob SquarePants. There was no balance in the composition. There was no sense of composition at all.

  But Victoria was complimentary and encouraging. “It’s just a start,” she said. “Keep at it. You’ll improve. This whole thing is really cool.”

  She said nothing about the nudity.

  fourteen |

  The next Sunday, I woke early, ahead of Victoria and the kids, and stepped out onto the back patio, glassy with the fresh rainwater of a dawn shower. The air was redolent with the fragrance of newly moist soil, and the sun was just beginning to break through the clouds. I saw Made removing gecko droppings from the floor of the villa as part of his morning routine. He smiled broadly to wish me good morning. “Selamat pagi, Mister Ben.”

  “Selamat pagi, Made.”

  I walked to the gazebo to prepare for a yoga session while everyone slept. I looked at my smartphone to download a podcast and scrolled past David Farmar, an instructor who taught a particularly aggressive style of yoga known as Baptiste. He was my standard podcast when I could not make it to Yoga Barn. I chose instead an instructor new to me, Nikki Wong, a yogi from Northern California who recorded her classes and posted them online.

  I unrolled my mat onto the gazebo’s teak floorboards, careful to avoid a patch of sunshine that escaped the roof’s shade. Practicing yoga under the sun’s blazing heat would be unbearable. I removed my shirt and stood barefoot, wearing only a pair of shorts. I felt the cool tropical breeze against my body and popped in my earbuds.

  I stood at the top of my mat and listened to Nikki’s instructions to set an intention. When yoga teachers instructed me to set an intention, I had once struggled with the concept. I had no idea what they had meant. But now I understood. Intention was doing something deliberately so that it has meaning. Intention was what was missing in Malcolm Gladwell’s well-known ten-thousand-hour rule that many hours of practice were required to achieve excellence. It was the intention to improve while putting in those hours that was crucially important. Just showing up didn’t do it.

  I had attended many business meetings where the chair of the meeting asks each individual around the table, “Are you present?” or “Are you in?” Like setting an intention, it was a way of establishing presence. As a manager and a leader, it was easy for me to distinguish who was present and who wasn’t, who wanted to be in the room and who didn’t. Some had the patience and the commitment to participate, while others consistently peeked at their smartphones or arrived late and left early. I too had been in situations where I was not present, where I was performing a task in which I had no interest. There was neither joy nor value in those tasks. Without presence or intention, the people around the boardroom table might as well be telling each other jokes.

  I checked in and listened to Nikki ask me to form mountain pose: stand straight, big toes touching, inner thighs turned slightly inward, and hands in a prayer position at the chest. I imagined a straight vertical plumb line that ran from the crown of my head to the bottom of my heels to form the pose. I felt the full force of my feet touching the mat and focused on that tactile sensation. Much as in meditation, mountain position in yoga evoked in me strength, weight, and quiet force.

  I directed my attention to my breathing. I placed my hands at the front of the mat, feet at the back, and hips scooped up into the air to form the most basic of poses, downward-facing dog. I breathed slowly and carefully, creating an ocean sound by narrowing my throat passage as I inhaled slowly. The air filled my lower belly, my lower ribcage, and then my upper chest.

  Nikki talked me through some warm-up poses and then picked up the pace. I flowed from one pose to the next. High push-up, low push-up. Up-dog, down-dog. Inhale, exhale. I hopped to the front of my mat and then flew to the back of it and squeezed. Heat built up and sweat began to form. I brought my attention back to my ocean breath, making it loud and witnessing it as if it were not my own, as if my sense of ego were slowly being exhaled from my body. I felt both engaged and detached, simultaneously inside and outside of my own head.

  I looked down. The bright patch of yellow sunlight arched toward me. I reached back into a peaceful warrior pose, then forward to a triangle pose. I witnessed my breath again in detached observation, watching my poses unfold just as I watched my thoughts in meditation.

  I began to wonder about the transitions between the poses. Like the poses themselves, transitions require integrity, grace, and dignity. Exiting one posture and charging on to the next without attention and focus risked collapsing the whole situation into a jumbled mess.

  Yoga transitions were a metaphor for other areas of my life. Sabbatical was a personal and professional change for me, but I could recognize that it was only a temporary condition, perhaps only a transition. It was easy to mistake it for something more permanent, but the lesson from yoga was clear: stay too long in transitions and the sense of grounding vanishes; hurry through transitions and the opportunity to set up a strong next position is lost.

  Victoria and I had met expats in Bali who had confused temporary change with enduring situations. They stayed in Bali too long and began to lose touch with Western society. Some had found genuine belonging in Bali, but others seemed to be in a state of eternal transition, never quite finding their footing in either Bali or their home territories. I tried to convince myself that I needed to use Bali as a stepping-stone to the next phase of my professional and personal life. But the notion of staying longer nagged at me.

  Impossibly, Nikki called through my earbuds, “Where did you go? Where did you go?” It was as if she had entered my mind. “Bring your attention back to your breath. Check in. Where did you go?”

  Sweat practically squirted from my forehead. That bright spot of sunshine was nearly at my mat. I was tired but felt my breath and shifted into relaxation. I wrapped my torso around for a twisted lunge. I relaxed into the pose and held it, with each exhale wringing my body like a wet towel. I grimaced with the effort and then lost my balance. My back leg failed, and my knee fell to the mat. I recovered quickly and reassumed the pose and held it until it was time for the next.

  In tree pose, I gazed intensely at a point in space—a knot in the hardwood frame of the gazebo—to enhance
my balance. I stared, trying to hold my balance standing on one leg, back arched, and arms reaching skyward. My focus strayed, and my balance went with it. I fell to the side as my body followed my mind.

  In yoga, balance derives from the proper placement of limbs, head, and torso in relation to each other. In art, balance suggests itself when color, shape, and line are composed in a way that defines a work. In business, balance requires all elements of an enterprise to dovetail to create a competitive edge. It isn’t enough to get costs aligned with revenue to create profit. Without having a point in the distance to focus on, balance, strength, and purpose become difficult, and the business is thrown off-kilter and falters. In yoga as elsewhere, to lose attention is to risk collapse.

  Again, I heard Nikki: “Where did you go? Where did you go?”

  I brought my attention back to the gazebo and settled down on my belly, reaching back to grab my feet. By extending my legs while simultaneously resisting them with my arms, I lifted my chest and arched my back to create the shape of a bow. In the next pose, I lay my right shin across the front of the mat, left leg extended behind me, thigh pressed against the mat, then folded torso over shin and dropped into half-pigeon pose.

  What else can you drop? What else can you let go of?

  The anguish I’d felt over leaving a life in the pursuit of excellence had melted away over the previous months. In its place, I felt joy again. I judged less and smiled more. I became interested in other people. I felt closer to my children and, especially, my wife. We spent all our free time together. Not every couple could survive that kind of closeness after nearly twenty years of being together, but for us it was joyful.

  Where did you go?

  I lifted my body from pigeon pose. The tension in my hip and lower back released over the course of ten breaths. I flowed through several more seated poses until I finally arrived at corpse pose, lying on my back perfectly still and feeling the supportive grounding of the floor against my body. After more than an hour of movement, of doing, corpse was a few moments of simply being.