Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  Bright sunlight had already invaded my mat, but I would not get out of its way. Instead, I surrendered to it and felt it heat my skin. A few moments later, I sat at the top of the mat with my legs crossed in front. I felt grounded, centered, and unflappable. I placed my hands in a prayer position with my thumbs between my eyes and bowed my head, expressing gratitude for nothing and to nobody in particular.

  fifteen |

  Sam returned home from school, dropped his books in a chair, and paced, frowning and muttering, from one end of the house to the other. His class had watched Tapped, a film about the environmental and health hazards of plastic-bottled water. It was a heavy-handed video with a strong point of view, but it raised his awareness that even something as simple and ubiquitous as bottled water could have multifaceted ramifications. I was surprised that Sam was so affected. I had never before heard him express an opinion about anything that didn’t impact him directly.

  “It makes me kind of mad.” He removed his laptop from his backpack and showed me an image of the great garbage patch, a huge collection of debris floating in the Pacific Ocean. It was a vortex of the world’s plastic trash swept together by the ocean’s circular currents. And it was enormous. I flashed for a moment to the miniature gravitational water vortex that was supposed to power Green School but never quite worked properly. Some things at Green School were simply aspirational.

  “There’s one in the Atlantic too,” he said. Without my prodding, he volunteered some action. “Can we stop using plastic water bottles?” We discussed it at dinner that night, and the family agreed to stop drinking from plastic bottles and instead carry small canteens. We also vowed to stop using the plastic bags that came with every trip to the grocery store and littered the water around Bali’s beaches.

  A few weeks later, on Earth Day, Sam requested we turn out the lights for one hour at night. We sat in the dark and ribbed Sam about his “hour of power.” But I was taken by Sam’s own emerging power. I sensed in him a dawning awareness of issues larger than those in front of his nose.

  It wasn’t only a political awakening that I noticed. Sam’s and his siblings’ creativity emerged too. Sam and some of the kids in his class formed a band, with him on electric guitar. A few weeks later, on spring vacation, we took a side trip to Rajasthan, India, where Sam and Oliver shot a music video of a song that Oliver’s music class had written about water conservation. With edgy camera angles and staccato shots of Oliver rapping amid a variety of settings—markets, temples, dunes, hills, and the Taj Mahal—among locals, elephants, camels, and his family, Oliver performed “The Water Rap,” exhorting listeners, in a catchy and humorous way, to conserve water and poking fun at Green School’s self-composting toilets. Back home, Sam and Oliver edited the video and released it on the internet under the label Sabbatical Records.

  I asked Sam if he thought his time at Green School was changing him. “It’s cool to be in an international school and get to know kids from all over the place.” Back home, his social milieu was uniform. His friends shared more or less similar backgrounds, the school curriculum was circumscribed, and the balance of learning tipped in favor of tradition and convention over exploration and creativity. Green School felt expansive to him. Sabbatical was apparently a gift not only to Victoria and me, with the kids along just for the ride.

  Victoria’s phone calls, which had been tapering off, were staging a comeback. Victoria had helped her organization find a space before she left, and they had put money into designing its build-out, but now the owner was backing out. Victoria felt responsible and wanted to help deal with it. She wasn’t able to handle this crisis in absentia, and she took it hard. “I can’t even succeed at what they need me to do.”

  Asher and Peter invited me on another of their afternoon bike rides. By then, I had learned how to handle myself better on Indonesian terrain. We started, as usual, at Green School, worked our way through the commercial traffic of Mambal, then took a jeep track behind a large field. We rode through bush and rice paddies on a single track that emptied onto a paved road. To my left, a large field hosted a makeshift billboard: “This Land Is Not for Sale.” I had thought about buying a small place in Bali to own a bit of paradise. Besides, it was probably a good investment. My commercial logic was that Asia generally was riding the coattails of India’s and China’s hypergrowth. The raft of newly minted millionaires and billionaires being created would want their slice of heaven too. And there was only one Bali. But while the call of commerce returned to me, buying real estate in Bali was a complicated affair. Families sometimes sold their compounds for a fast profit only to spend the money quickly, often with disastrous results to family and society. That sign was a voice of protest and I needed to listen. I fought my instincts, let compassion overrule economic reason, and noted the change in my attitude.

  With some hairy turns and short, steep climbs, we pulled into Ubud to end the afternoon ride. I followed Asher and Peter, this time on my bike, as they bounced down some stairs. I had all the confidence of an experienced mountain biker. An art gallery about one hundred yards away caught my eye. I made a note to return when I wasn’t covered in sweat and mud.

  One week later, Victoria and I visited and met the artist, I Wayan Karja. He was my age, spoke a soft English, and was happy to share his story. Karja had studied in the United States and had exhibited broadly outside Indonesia. I found him unusual because he was one of the few painters I had met who could verbalize his artistic intention. His paintings were abstract and minimalist. Some were color fields; others created circular movements that he said were like a mandala, a Hindu symbolic representation of the world. But his interpretation was the opposite of symbols. Instead of the figurative and iconic details of traditional mandalas, he tried to distill his to pure abstraction, to convey only the energy and movement of the mandala.

  Karja led us through his studio. Racks of completed canvases stood next to his work area. Tubes of paint were neatly arrayed on a worktable. His work area, like his paintings, was clean and neat. A giant canvas lying flat on the floor was being prepared for his next piece. He led us to the gallery, flooded with natural tropical light, that I’d seen from my bike.

  Victoria and I walked around and considered his paintings. We were taken by two of them especially. One he called Meditation, a work in dynamic blues with a subtle billowing shape in the center that he said was his interpretation of breath. We were concerned that it was too large for our home in New York. The other was a warm color field of reds and orange. In this painting, like many of his others, Karja painted a dark cleft in the middle of the right-hand edge to convey a Balinese sense of balance, a unity of opposing forces. Over the course of a few days, we agreed on a price, and the painting was ours.

  I was taken by Karja’s work. To a non-Balinese, it was accessible. It touched on two core practices that I was developing: meditation and art. And it spoke to some of the themes I’d been struggling with: the sense of balance in my life and the quest for a feeling of grounding and centeredness, even as I knew I had more work to do on that front—on all those fronts.

  sixteen |

  It was late spring back in New York when Victoria and Oliver returned there to attend a family affair. Before they left, Victoria and I had searched for something special for the rest of us to do while they were gone. We settled on a side trip to Sumatra to visit Gunung Leuser National Park, one of two remaining habitats of the Sumatran orangutan. To the north of the island was the region of Aceh, the closest land point to the epicenter of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The resulting tsunami had destroyed the region.

  We flew to Medan and from there took a taxi to the tiny village of Bukit Lawang. I kept a curious eye out the window as we escaped the traffic and motorcycle exhaust of the city. The urban sprawl soon gave way to countryside. As we drove along, we saw that wide swaths of rainforest had been clear-cut. Gone were the foliage and hardwoods. In their place, rows upon rows for miles upon miles of palm trees—periodica
lly interspersed by a palm-oil processing plant—lined the landscape. The soil was a muddy rust-colored muck, devoid of green cover. Truck tracks rutted the dirt roads. Discarded palm fronds littered the roadside. These were no quaint farms but large industrial complexes that visibly injured the earth.

  The ride took longer than expected, but by late afternoon, the taxi arrived at Gotong Royong, a village just a ten-minute walk from Bukit Lawang, which was inaccessible by car. A slight young man from the bungalow we’d rented met us to help with our bags. We walked up a single track, he in his flip-flops, we in our American hiking boots. The bungalow had two levels, the lower of which lay down steep stairs and rested near the banks of the swirling, fast-moving Bohorok River, which flowed between the bungalow and the national park.

  We dropped our bags and prepared to settle in. I called to my kids, “Boys on the top level, girls below.”

  The young porter pulled me aside. “Mister, the little girls should stay on the top level.” He explained that a few years earlier, a flash flood came crashing down from the hills above and wiped out everything in its path, including the village and more than two hundred people. “Just in case.”

  “Wait. What?”

  I had been in Indonesia long enough to know that bad things could happen easily and often. The fear response in my brain lit up, beginning in the amygdala. That neurological structure plays a critical role in the impulse that startles us before the brain determines whether true danger is present. It sends the alarm at seeing a coiled rope before the executive sections of the brain determine it isn’t a snake and issue an all-clear signal. Even though humans evolved greater functions, part of the nervous system, almost reptilian in its unemotional and nonanalytical drive for survival, is fearful and always on the lookout for danger, real or imagined, prehistoric or contemporary. It is suspected to be a prime source of modern-day anxiety and negative bias, seeing danger where none exists and exaggerating risk.

  In the corporate world, I had been both predator and prey. Working in that universe, my amygdala was set to full throttle. I acted with aggression, even hostility, when I saw opportunities. When a large competitor aggressed, I fought intensely for a maximal outcome. Even when not in direct battle, I was always looking for a strategic advantage, just as any CEO should. But in the process, I lived with a constant rasp of anxiety because I was always on high alert, always on the lookout for hazards.

  Fear wasn’t all bad. While giving free rein to fear almost never led to a good outcome, letting it inform decision-making was critical to sound judgment. In Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was one of the first to point out the role of emotion in informing sound judgment. When a decision appears to be reasoned and rational but nonetheless evokes fear, it’s ill advised to ignore the inner voice that signals alarm and cautions that something’s not quite right.

  Fear also could be the midwife of virtue because without fear, there could be no courage. When others told me I was courageous for taking a sabbatical, it was because they recognized the career risk I was taking and, with that, all the doomsday scenarios the mind can conjure. And yet, at some level, they recognized the benefit of leaning into the fear in order to cultivate the greater value of courage.

  Now in Sumatra, in the face of real potential danger, I was plainly nervous. Even if I had wanted to turn back, there was no possibility of it because night was falling and travel to and from the village needed to be carefully coordinated. We were going to spend at least the night.

  We strolled down a short walkway to Yusri Café and ordered our Indo standby, nasi goreng, vegetable fried rice, which was greasier and saltier than I would have liked. The power generators shut down early, and we had barely an hour after dinner to brush our teeth and get organized for bed. I took the porter’s advice and sent the girls upstairs. We all relied on book lights for reading and got an early night’s sleep.

  In the morning, our guide picked us up after breakfast at Yusri Café. The air was fresh and the sky a clear cerulean blue. Amin took us across the river by open riverboat to the national park entrance and a feeding station where rangers cared for some of the semiwild orangutans. From there we went with Amin directly into the jungle to look for wild orangutans. About one hour into our trek, we hadn’t seen a single animal. Amin said, “Stay here. I’ll go ahead to see if I can attract an orangutan.”

  We sat on a downed log and snacked on food we’d brought with us. After about fifteen minutes, alone with my children in the middle of a jungle, I became increasingly aware of our solitude in the thick brush. The trails were unmarked, my cell phone screen showed “No Service,” and our guide had disappeared. It was just three children, a vast jungle, and me. There went my brain again, responding not to imagined dangers but to real ones, not to the industrial predators that used to worry me at work but to natural ones like the snakes, tigers, and rhinos of the Sumatran jungle.

  I looked for movement in the bush, which seemed serene enough. I called out to Amin. Nothing. I called out again. After about thirty long minutes, just when I was about to completely freak out, he showed up out of nowhere. “Come this way,” he cheerfully said in his thick Indonesian accent. He pointed to a rustling in a tree about five hundred feet away. I looked up to find a large orange giant of an ape swinging slowly through the branches toward us. Though she seemed to lumber along, she covered the distance in about fifteen seconds. She stopped at a branch just overhead and made herself comfortable.

  “Always keep five meters between you and the orangutan,” Amin said. “If she gets too close, back away slowly and calmly.” The orangutan lounged on that branch, eating whatever she had grabbed along the way, and just watched us with seeming disinterest. The sheer mass of that wild animal and its humanlike face left me breathless. Rita whispered under her breath, “Whoa! That is so cool.” Nava started to imitate Amin’s faux mating call, placing her palm at her mouth and kissing it loudly. Amin asked her to cut it out. I knew Nava was dying to feed the animal, but that would be too dangerous.

  Eventually the orangutan moved on. We continued hiking deeper into the rainforest and stopped for lunch along a creek. I asked Nava how she was holding up. We had been hiking for more than three hours. She said she was tired, and I told Amin it was time to head back.

  As we started for home, I felt a raindrop, and then another, until a steady rain developed. The tracks slowly muddied, and our clothes dampened. After about an hour, Nava said she couldn’t walk anymore. She just gave up as seven-year-olds do. I put her on my shoulders, and we carried on. When we had to clamber down a muddy slope, Amin and I passed Nava back and forth.

  By the time we returned to Bukit Lawang after some six hours in the jungle, the rain had become a fierce downpour. The Bohorok River, which was fast on a sunny day, was beginning to rage. I remembered what I had heard about the river flooding, and this time, I kept my eye on the distance between our bungalow and the riverbank.

  The rainstorm continued. The palm fronds outside our bungalow whipped in the wind. I grew increasingly uneasy. I looked for the manager of the bungalow but couldn’t find him. When I asked at the café about him, they said he had left for Medan. He seemed to have hightailed it out of town. There was nobody else to talk to about whether or not the rainfall was dangerous and what to do about it. The rain became ferocious, and so did the river.

  At dinner, Yusri Café was nearly empty. In the middle of our meal, the electricity went out, and we ate by candlelight. When I asked a couple of locals if they thought the rainwater was potentially dangerous, they just shrugged. My inner alarm system was blaring at full volume.

  I decided to move all of us to the upper level of the bungalow. Even Nava pitched in to help move the mattresses from below to the level above. The kids didn’t have trouble falling asleep, but I kept watch, listening to the rain and river below. Even as I tried to calm myself by focusing on my breath, as I’d trained myself in so-called calm-abiding meditation, my imagination ran wild. The place had
none of the safeguards I was used to in the West. There was no one and nothing to protect us, no one and no way to call for help. It was every person for him- or herself around here. I grew tired, and in time, I too fell asleep.

  In the morning’s early hours, the rain tapered off, and by the time the sun rose, the clouds had cleared. I looked out the window to see the river’s edge at a safe distance. I felt the tension deflate, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so unsafe.

  I decided I’d incorrectly assessed the risks of visiting that rainforest, especially with young children. In businesses, I often weighed risks and benefits to make what I hoped were clearheaded decisions but always left a cushion for error, which I thought was a hallmark of sound judgment. “If you were to distill the secret of sound investment into three words,” wrote the legendary investor Ben Graham, “we venture the motto, MARGIN OF SAFETY.”

  I didn’t know if we were ever in any serious danger during our trip to Bukit Lawang, because nothing bad resulted. But I’d misjudged the risk, and the cost of getting it wrong wouldn’t have been monetary but loss of life and limb. No meditation would help if things went the wrong way.

  It was not my finest parenting hour. Victoria certainly would have been more sensible.

  That day, the sun beat down hard. Moisture rose from the ground below, thickening the air with humidity that was almost solid. From our bungalow, we could see a pair of orangutans sunning themselves on a boulder by the riverbank. We stayed out of the jungle and flopped around in inner tubes in a slower part of the river.

  We returned to our bungalow by midafternoon, sopping wet. As Nava waited her turn for a warm shower, she shrieked and pointed to the porch outside. At least a half-dozen monkeys had gathered and whooped outside. Sam grabbed a towel and bolted from the shower. Rita and Nava had already closed the door and were watching from the window. While the kids made faces at the animals, the monkeys ravaged a tube of Pringles we’d left outside, urinated on our drying clothes, and made off with Sam’s flip-flops.