Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  On our way home, during the ten-minute hike from Bukit Lawang to the road where we would meet our car, Sam and Nava paused to put together another animal report video for her friends back home. Sam sported two-dollar flip-flops we bought at a local warung. Nava’s two front teeth, which had fallen out to reveal a stylish gap in her first video report from Africa, had grown back in and were visible as she filed her report for her class back home.

  A few days after we arrived back in Bali, I went to a drawing session at Pranoto’s gallery. I saw my friend Leo there and told him about our trip to Sumatra and specifically about the fear I’d felt. “The orangutans were beautiful,” I said, “and my kids had a great time. But honestly, I felt really unsafe.”

  Leo had lived in Indonesia for years, and his naked response surprised me. “That’s because Sumatra is unsafe.”

  seventeen |

  It was late March when, once again, I prepared to sit in meditation. I was beyond thinking that meditation was a curious science experiment. What had started as a passing interest in the intersection of brain plasticity and Buddhist philosophy had blossomed into a serious undertaking. It had once been awkward to sit in silence. Now it was a sober attempt to retune my brain, quiet my nerves, and cultivate positive emotions like optimism, joy, compassion, and altruism.

  I took a cushion from the house and dropped it on the gazebo’s hardwood floor, just out of view of the back patio. The giant maroon blossoms and emerald leaves of the banana plant in our backyard obscured the water that rushed from the spring just beyond the property. I lit a stick of incense and placed it on the floor about three feet in front of me. Once it burned through, I would know my session was over.

  I sat cross-legged on the cushion, the pyramid of my seat and legs forming a stable base upon which the rest of me rested. I felt the touch of cool air on my skin and took a deep breath. I set my intention: to change my thought patterns through meditation practice, crowding out natural aggression and feelings of competition with compassion and altruism.

  Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, was a foundational practice of Buddhism used to cultivate benevolence by imagining altruism and locking it with silent phrase repetition. I started a bit like other meditation, by sitting and bringing awareness to the breath: the inhale, the exhale, and the negative spaces between them. I was now able to shift quickly into awareness. The shift was slight, subtle enough almost to be a nonshift.

  Fragrant smoke from the incense wafted into my nostrils. I closed my eyes and relaxed them, letting them soften along with the rest of my body. I allowed my attention to fall on a few more deep breaths. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. There was no agenda, goals, or expectations other than to be fully present at that time and in that place.

  As the rhythm of my breathing steadied, I focused my attention on the fullness of each breath, one after another, sensing them as they began in the diaphragm and progressed to fill my lungs. I felt my chest and abdomen rise with each inhalation and slowly fall through each exhalation. I paid close attention to the breath, noticing which nostril predominated as air entered and left my body.

  Many minutes passed like that, breath after breath, until I expanded my attention to my surroundings, allowing the sensation of the breath to fade slightly into the background. With my eyes still closed, I listened to the sounds around me. A Hindu priest chanted at the nearby village temple, his supplicant voice soaring. In the distance, a musician hammered away at metal bars, playing gamelan. Crickets chirped and birds warbled. An airplane flew overhead, its jets eclipsing the natural sounds of my immediate surroundings. I tried not to locate the plane in the sky or to express a dislike for the overpowering roar. I simply accepted the sound for what it was, letting it arise in my awareness, stay for a while, and disappear.

  I returned my attention to the sound of my breath and then to the space between the breaths. In that empty silence, I noticed more sounds around me—a dog barking, a rooster crowing, a motorcycle driving by—until the sound of my next breath drew my attention again. From my drawing practice, I was increasingly sensitive to negative spaces. They had a way of enhancing perception and clarifying things. I noticed not just the space between shapes in a composition but also the silence between breaths. I saw my sabbatical as a negative space between professional challenges.

  My mind wandered to an email I needed to write. I chased that thought for a while until I noticed that my attention had drifted. I brought it back to my breath. Then my mind wandered again as I thought of yet another mundane item, rehashing a conversation I’d had. Again, I noticed the wandering and refocused on my breath. Like that, I let my thoughts come and go, like the sounds around me, without engaging or judging them, simply observing, over and over again.

  I felt the urge to scratch an itch on my right cheek. I didn’t react. My neural system didn’t necessarily work the way I’d been taught in school—that, in an infinitesimal instant, a neural message traveled from my cheek to my brain (itch), then from my brain to my hand (scratch). I knew now that between those two steps, the brain processed the information. There was room for the brain to fill in or to make things up entirely. By slowing down the process through meditation, by creating space, I could catch the impulse, slow it down, and quiet it. Instead of reaching for my cheek, I responded to the sensation by noting it and then focusing the laser beam of my attention on it. Magically, that simple act of bringing the itch from the periphery of my awareness to center stage melted the urge away. I returned my attention to my breath. I sat, surrendered in perfect stillness, feeling strength in the silence.

  I entered another zone and felt myself drift off. I felt the peace of being in that single moment, and from that moment to the next. I opened my eyes to regain my concentration and saw the incense candle on the floor, burnt about two-thirds of the way through. I focused my gaze on its red glow.

  Then out of nowhere and with my guard down, a tsunami of rage crashed into my consciousness. The anger was both familiar and intense. I thought I’d put it behind me, but its vestige now ambushed my calm. This time, I did not allow myself to be carried away by its power or to indulge in some endless loop of rumination. Instead, I leaned into it. As with an uninvited guest, I accepted its presence and welcomed it knowing that it would soon be leaving my consciousness.

  But instead of fading, the rage twisted to grief. I felt it as deeply as I could and let it stay as long as I could. And when I could hold it no longer, I bid it farewell. The moment felt like a catharsis. I imagined that I had passed through a portal to a new sort of peace.

  After a few minutes of grounding myself, my father entered the center stage of my conscious mind. It had been nearly twenty years since he died, but I could feel his love and support for me as fresh as if he were sitting beside me—and the rage and grief I’d felt at his sudden death. I imagined one of our hugs, his embrace always lasting a few moments longer than mine. I felt an acceptance from him that I did not need to earn or strive for. With each breath, I imagined his voice. May you experience peace and well-being. May you be protected and free from harm. May you have peace of mind.

  For a moment, I felt silly imagining those phrases in my mind, but fragments of language didn’t matter. What was important was the emotion. It helped imprint memory on the brain and create strong neural connections to combat mindlessness and disquiet. Breathing in his unconditional love and support was a start at creating neural pathways that emphasized positive emotion. Before long, I shifted to language that emphasized self-compassion: May I experience peace and well-being. May I be protected and free from harm. May I have peace of mind. I repeated the phrases over and over again, not mindlessly like a chant, but with full awareness and wholeheartedness. And again, I sensed my breath, the sounds around me, the sensation of my seat on the cushion.

  Bathed in that loving kindness, I extended my field of compassion to include those closest to me, projecting rather than receiving kindheartedness. It was easiest to start with somebody I kne
w and loved naturally. I thought specifically about my children, especially Rita, who had suffered socially, and Oliver, still trying to gain his footing with new friends. I imagined draping them in fatherly love: May you experience peace and well-being. May you be protected and free from harm. May you have peace of mind. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  My mind wandered. Struggling to maintain my concentration, I returned to the breath and the phrases and the emotions they evoked. From my children, I expanded my field of loving kindness to someone neutral and to whom I had no natural emotional connection. I thought about the men and women I had seen working the mines and fields around Ijen and about the imprisoned Bali Nine, broadcasting in my mind the metta phrase over and over again. May you be protected and free from harm. May you have peace of mind.

  Finally, I thought of relationships that were difficult for me. My work relationships were many things, but they were not uncomplicated. In a world of intense competition, where often one person’s gain came at another’s expense, it was good to recognize everyone’s common humanity and common desires to lead happy and fulfilling lives. We all were seeking the same things, no matter how we went about it. And as I sat there and wished it all for them—happiness, well-being, security—I felt the sense of competition and conflict deflate. In its place, openness and calm settled in.

  In the distance, I heard Oliver and Rita bickering, the heat of their quarrel rising, as it sometimes did. I sank back into my zone, watching my thoughts as they passed through my awareness. I deliberately thought to cultivate compassion, first for myself, then others.

  I sat in that state of mind for a while longer until I noticed the absence of any incense smell. I cracked my eyes open just a tiny bit to see that the incense stick had burned to its base and gone out. I looked at my watch. I had been sitting there for more than forty minutes, doing nothing but being aware of the texture of my surroundings, listening to the sound of my breath, and noticing the thoughts in my mind. It was not that I wasn’t doing anything for forty minutes. I was simply being in that place and time, and that was everything.

  Soon, I would end the meditation and stretch out my legs, and I would be back in the usual day-to-day. I knew that the practice of meditation, of falling back to awareness and observation of the conscious mind, took a long time to be effective, but ultimately, slowly, my mindset would shift.

  I took in one last deep breath and extended my legs. I felt a stillness in my mind and a sense of peace. Through the mental gestures of loving kindness, I was able to let go of rancor and felt a joy of being alive. I gave my legs a few moments to adjust and work out the tingling before I stood. From the house, the bickering had escalated into something fierce. “Where’s Daddy?” Rita shouted.

  I lifted the cushion from the floor and headed back into the house. I’d have to break the kids apart, but I didn’t tense up at the prospect. Perhaps one day they would outgrow their conflict. I didn’t need to get caught up in the drama, but perhaps I could help defuse it.

  eighteen |

  A week or so later, I met Karel for lunch. He was a tall man about my age sporting neatly cut hair, a former partner at McKinsey, the leading global management-consulting firm, which would be hard to deduce from his loose tropical clothing and soft, boyish looks. When I first met him, I had asked him why he had come to Bali. He said his fourteen-year-old son needed him, and he couldn’t be present for him while traveling relentlessly to client meetings. He did not offer more about it, only that he chose his family over his grueling work schedule. He put his son into Green School as part of a plan to rededicate himself to his family and reset his priorities.

  When it came to corporate careers, I felt Karel and I understood each other. He was an accomplished and thoughtful professional who could navigate his way through any business situation or organization. Now past the halfway point of our sabbatical, I was thinking about how I would handle returning home to my job.

  We had arranged to meet at Clear Café on Hanuman Street. It wasn’t a fancy place, but its architecture was an expression of the Ubud vernacular: yogi chic decor and fresh organic food. A wide convex staircase strewn with flower petals and tea candles led to the restaurant’s entrance. Carved Indonesian hardwood framed the entranceway. An attendant exchanged my shoes for a claim check, just as an out-of-work actress in New York would do for a coat. She added my shoes to a jumbled pile.

  Karel waited for me at a low-slung table made of lava stone. He sat cross-legged and upright on a cushion, the way many other patrons did. Months of practice at Yoga Barn had changed the way his large body could sit and move. When I joined him, a waitress came by and took our orders. I had my favorites, a fruit elixir made with local turmeric and a spicy green papaya salad.

  He had recently returned to the Czech Republic to interview for his next gig. Among the opportunities he was exploring was the CEO position at a promising biotech company he was excited about. He thought the work was serious and engaging and promised real financial upside.

  I was beginning to think about ways I could engage in my career and still maintain the sense of abundance I had in Bali. I had recently read Flourish by Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and founder of an academic field called positive psychology. His earlier book was an instruction manual on raising children to be optimists because, he posited, raising optimistic children was akin to inoculating them against adult depression. It had helped Victoria and me with Oliver.

  As a young child, Oliver often returned from school with stories that were variations on the same theme: “Everything bad always happens to me.” Victoria and I followed Seligman’s advice and reminded Oliver, whenever he recounted a vignette with that theme, that what happens in the course of the day is not pervasive, personal, or permanent. Sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad. Sometimes they happen to you, sometimes to others. And nothing is forever.

  When the brain is young, it is most plastic and able to change. By following Seligman’s advice, we attempted to recalibrate Oliver’s negative bias, which was natural enough—everyone has a default set point on the spectrum of optimism and pessimism—but would not serve him well in adulthood. We were striving for something more positive. Over the course of time, we saw real changes in Oliver.

  Now Seligman had advice for me. He sought to define a concept of an adult life of well-being and developed a checklist that went under the acronym of PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. I felt I’d recently made good progress on most fronts, especially through deliberate cultivation of positive emotion and relationships. But the concept of meaning eluded me.

  “Don’t you get enough meaning by providing for your family?” Karel asked.

  “At some point I did. Now I’m not so sure. My career definitely engages me. And I get a buzz from achievement. In fact, I crave it. But meaning? I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think about meaning?”

  “I think it depends on circumstances. It’s so broad and personal. I have to say, though, I’m inspired by what the Hardys are trying to do with Green School—not that it doesn’t have its problems, but something about the vision, both a little out of reach yet still motivating. Not just its commitment to progressive education and global citizenship and all that but also a general push toward a greater good.”

  “Maybe you can find a cause you care about. Something that serves others. You don’t have to find that kind of meaning in your job. You have to find it in your life.”

  I chewed on my salad and contemplated that for a moment.

  “Anyway,” he said, “you headed back to the same old life, or has something fundamentally changed? What are you thinking about for a job?”

  “You just flew halfway around the planet for a bunch of job interviews. My focus right now is on being still—just being—for a few months.”

  “And what about doing? You still have to work, don’t you?”

  The synthesis of being and doing was sim
ple in theory but difficult in practice. In fact, it was the fundamental challenge I was facing. After doing for so long in my career and being on my sabbatical, I would have to find a way to simultaneously keep my sense of awakening and be productive in the world.

  “There are worse things than being a partner in an investment firm,” I said. “The partners are smart. The work is interesting. It pays well. How bad could it be?”

  Karel sipped his cashew milk chai latte. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I have a new perspective on things. I can now deal with the mind-traps of that kind of life.” I sensed he still wasn’t buying it. “I just need to get my mojo back.”

  The waitress came by with the check.

  “Mojo?”

  “Swagger. I need to get excited about it again.”

  “Oh, you’ll get that back once you return,” he said as we fished for a few thousand rupiah to pay for lunch. He did not sound convinced. Here was a management consultant whose clients paid good money for strategic advice. He probably saw me as someone who did not have a fully formulated strategy.

  On the way out, we handed our claim checks to the woman at the front door, who couldn’t find our shoes. Eventually, Karel and I found them ourselves. We both needed to head to Green School for pickup, and I wanted to watch my kids play in an after-school Ultimate Frisbee match. My kids and Peter were the only ones who knew the game prior to our arrival in Bali. They not only taught the other kids and parents but organized regular competitive matches. I loved watching kids from all over the world—especially the Indonesians—toss a disc on Green School’s large soccer field.