by Ben Feder
We mounted our motorbikes. “You know,” I said, “I often advise colleagues never to burn bridges. But lately I’m wondering if some bridges need to be burned. Everything has its natural life cycle. Perhaps it’s time let go and move on.”
That evening, Victoria received another phone call from her organization. This one seemed quieter and calmer. After it ended, she sat silently with the phone in her lap. After a minute or two, she let out a deep breath. “At last,” she said. “The board decided to make a change to professional leadership.”
“That’s great,” I said, hoping I was reading the signs right.
She smiled. “It finally sank in I wasn’t coming back and JCP needed to be self-sustaining.”
For the first time on the trip, she looked truly relaxed.
nineteen |
A few weeks later, Victoria and I drove our motorbike to the Purist Hotel outside Ubud. We pulled into the parking area, removed our helmets, and locked them to the bike the way Nyoman had showed us, placing the chinstraps into the locking mechanism of the saddle, securing them into place, and turning the key. We walked down a narrow footpath to the lobby to meet friends visiting from Chicago. Eric and Sharon had arrived in Ubud with their three children the day before. I smiled at how utterly worn our clothes looked compared to the crisp tops and bottoms they’d just unpacked. Our white shirts had turned gray from laundering in Bali’s water and local detergent. I never reached lower than three layers down my clothing pile because Putu laundered daily. Neither Victoria nor I had cut our hair since the fall. Our clothes and hair were on sabbatical too.
After hugs all around, Victoria got down to business. “We’ve got a full itinerary for you guys. Whitewater rafting, biking, ropes course. And temples, lots of temples.” She caught the eye roll from Matthew, their oldest. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’ll be lots of downtime.” One thing we’d learned about traveling abroad with children was to reserve a few hours each day for nothing but play or splashing around in a pool.
I was eager to talk to Eric privately. He and I were both curious about meditation, Buddhist philosophy, and living in a way that he called “conscious.” We were equally surprised by the hold that something as obscure as Eastern philosophy could have on us.
Yet Eric was on a special journey. Through meditation and other practices, he consciously set about to develop neural connections that promoted positive emotions, personal relationships, and a sense of abundance in his life. His mantra was notice, shift, rewire. First, notice negative thoughts as they occur, then shift them into something more positive to rewire synaptic connections. He meant that through meditation and by deliberately shifting thoughts from negative to positive, a sense of joy could be permanently etched into the brain. “Happiness is a teachable mental skill. It’s a matter of training your brain,” he said. “It’s an inside job.”
One morning during their stay, Eric borrowed Victoria’s mountain bike, and he and I headed for Green School in a race to beat Nyoman and the kids. They had the benefit of the car, but we had the ability to skirt through traffic. Plus, we gave ourselves a head start.
As we set out at seven o’clock in the morning, the air was still cool, and the road to town was inked by morning shade. We cycled out of their hotel toward the center of Ubud. I played tour guide and pointed out a lavishly ornamented effigy of a black-and-gold bull under construction in the courtyard of the Royal Palace, just across the street from the central market on Jalan Raya. It was two stories tall and being prepared for a traditional cremation ceremony that would incinerate both the bull and the body entombed in it in a great ball of flame.
We turned down Hanuman Street toward Monkey Forest. The monkeys in the park were already hungrily searching for food. A few of them blocked our path but screeched and quickly scampered out of the way as we cycled on.
Eric asked, “How are you feeling about going back to work?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it much, but when I do, the thing I’m curious about is how to keep this sense of peace while competing in the world. I wonder if I’ll have lost my edge or somehow gotten weak.”
Eric’s response was quick. “You’ve taken a giant step. You’ve assumed responsibility for the course of your life. You’re not clinging to habits to secure your sense of self. That’s strength, not weakness. That’s big, big strength.” He was complimenting me, but as if from a higher plane of wisdom.
We weaved our way through the narrow streets of Nyuh Kuning.
“The thing is,” he said, “ambition for ambition’s sake doesn’t provide meaning or anything larger to frame your work.” He had a brain-science explanation for every human behavior. “With each success, your brain gets a dopamine hit. You begin to crave it and find yourself just wanting more. But it’s never enough. And anyway, it’s a sugar high. It doesn’t last.”
This rang true. What had bothered me about striving was that it just led to more striving in the way that wanting just led to more wanting. I was constantly trying to push myself to greater achievement. It worked for a long time, but somewhere along the way, it no longer did.
We cycled down a trail that wound its way behind the John Hardy jewelry factory. I was preoccupied by our conversation when we turned a corner and heard the clanging of a gamelan. Before we knew it, we were amid a village ceremonial procession that blocked our way. A line of about thirty smiling Balinese women in sarongs, sashes, and lace tops carried towers of fresh fruit on their heads in devotional offering. Next to them, men in smaller numbers carried ceremonial parasols. They filed past as they made their way to the local temple. We dismounted our bikes, returned their smiles, and waited for them to pass. I had seen these ceremonies many times, but they still brought me joy.
“As for losing your edge,” Eric said, “I think that warrants a little inquiry practice.”
“What’s that?”
“Most people actually believe their own thoughts. But thoughts are not facts. They’re just thoughts. They don’t necessarily reflect reality. Whenever you hear your inner voice saying, ‘I haven’t achieved enough,’ or ‘I don’t have what it takes,’ or whatever—and we all have that inner voice—ask yourself this: ‘Is it true?’ We’re all attached to our stories, but it’s worth asking coldly, ‘What evidence do you have to prove beyond doubt that it’s true?’” He suggested I ruthlessly apply the Socratic method to the judgmental opinions of my own mind. “If you can’t find that evidence—because guess what? Most of the time it doesn’t exist—then imagine how you’d feel if you told yourself a different story or simply envisioned yourself without that self-critical thought.”
Okay, he was right. I’d engaged in my fair share of that kind of thinking before I left on sabbatical. Why not subject my thoughts to the same discipline and analysis that business decisions required? How did I know what I thought I knew? Where was the data?
Inquiry was a meditation of sorts; thoughts, not circumstances, had the power to inflict suffering. The sense of dissatisfaction was an illusion of the mind. Like meditation, the first step to overcoming negative thoughts was being conscious of them, to see them the way a meditator sees them and witness them from afar.
“You’ll see when you get back to the US. Everybody compares themselves to others. They focus less on absolute achievement and more on achievement relative to their friends or whoever happens to be in the business press. It’s a negative thought stream that’s a recipe for unending suffering.”
I knew what he meant. Back in New York, try as I might to fight it, I often compared how I was doing relative to others. When I did, I tried to remember another lesson from rowing. I’d hear the voice of my school rowing coach bellowing from the riverbank: “Keep your eyes in your own boat!” Diverting my attention from what was happening in my own shell to the racing eight next to me was a sure strategy for failure, especially as we pushed to the finish. I knew comparing was an unwinnable race. Still, it took energy to fight the impulse.
Eric said, “You know that self-critical voice that you—and everyone else—have? Think about this: Would you ever let yourself talk to anybody else as harshly as you talk to yourself?”
“Got any reading materials to recommend?” I asked.
“Anything by Byron Katie,” Eric said. “A Thousand Names for Joy is the best self-help book there is. You’re going to love, love, love what she has to say.”
When the procession passed, I looked at my watch, mindful of the time and the contest. We needed to pick up the pace. We cycled past the Aqua water-filtration plant, over a bridge that spanned the Ayung River, and down a road that headed toward the village of Mambal.
I called out, “You up for a shortcut?” Before Eric had a chance to respond, I led us off the main road and down to a grassy path that ran by a wide canal. From there, the trail led through thick tropical brush and narrowed to a thin ribbon of rocky soil. By now, I’d gotten used to these Balinese bike tracks.
About half a kilometer along, another trail broke off to the left in a straight line up a steep incline. We took it. My rear wheel spun, but I quickly regained traction by shifting my weight farther back on the bike. Eric was right behind me.
We came upon a clearing where the foundation of a new villa was being built. Freshly cut trees and foliage lay on the ground. A deep, wide swath of ochre soil lay bare in the bright tropical light. The Green School’s environmental agenda was having its impact on me, and I was momentarily saddened by the wound in the earth and the loss of jungle to make room for yet another villa. Construction seemed to be picking up, and with Bali having little in the way of zoning laws, it threatened the island’s greenery.
We cycled for another fifteen minutes, talking more about self-inquiry. We reached the school entrance just ahead of Nyoman and the kids. Asher smiled and waved from behind his counter at the warung. “Coffee?”
We spent the morning touring Green School and Green Village, another Hardy project, a community of high-end homes, made of bamboo and other sustainable materials that were architecturally no less magnificent than the school’s buildings. The homes spiraled from the verdant ground to float above the canopy and overlook a terraced ravine that led to the Ayung River.
As we exited Green Village on a footpath, I asked Eric if he ever considered taking some extended time off. He paused for a moment to consider the question. He shrugged nonchalantly. “My life’s a sabbatical.” I observed my spasm of competitiveness and annoyance. It quickly evaporated, and I chuckled to myself.
On a morning I planned to spend drawing at Pranoto’s, Eric and Sharon borrowed our motorbike and dropped me off at the studio. It wasn’t legal to have three on a bike, but having seen local families hang as many as seven on a single bike, I pushed it. They motored off to the wholesale shopping road near Tegalalang in search of small mementos. Instead they found a life-sized standing stone Buddha that was so large and heavy, it had to be shipped back to Chicago by marine cargo.
When they returned to the villa later in the day, I needed the bike to pick up Nava from a playdate in Sayan, on the other side of Ubud. Eric asked to join. He sat on the back of the bike, and when we picked up Nava, she sat between my legs on the front of the bike’s saddle. “Nava!” I yelled over the bike’s motor. “Sing ‘Living in Bali’ for Eric!” She immediately launched into it, belting out her school’s spirit song.
Living in Bali
We know where we’re going.
Our river is flowing,
The current is strong.
The light in our eyes
Is the place we believe in
Destiny’s weaving.
It guides us along.
Living in Bali
The island’s life giver,
The great Ayung River,
Flashes and darts,
Carries our hope
From the hills to the ocean,
A powerful motion
That strengthens our hearts.
Hey! Hey ya—a—a!
This is who we are.
Hey hey hey ya—a—a!
Living in the heart of Indonesia.
Our families spent the next few days together, adventuring, splashing, talking, and eating. “Our kids are infatuated with yours,” Sharon said to me. I thought the feeling was mutual. The unacknowledged and good-natured rivalry between Eric and me, I realized, enhanced the learning experience.
twenty |
In mid-April, Oliver returned from his Summit to Sea outing. The theme of Oliver’s field trip was water’s fundamental role in biodiversity, and he spoke excitedly as he told us about it. He had hiked to a thundering waterfall and, along the way, collected water samples from mountain streams. As monkeys observed him and his classmates from their overhead perches, he had picked his way through mangroves looking for mud samples to view under a magnifying glass. He had traveled by motorized jukung, a small wooden Indonesian outrigger canoe, to snorkel over a coral reef in the warm waters of the Bali Sea. He was on a total high from the experience. I wondered if his joy on this excursion stemmed from something similar to his love of team sports.
He returned home just as we were preparing for the Passover holiday’s festive meal, the Seder. We had invited our friends into our home to celebrate with us. My brother, who lived in Israel, would also join with his family. In New York, an invitation like that was commonplace, and many non-Jews attended them. In Bali, a Seder was a rare thing. Most of our friends had never participated in one, and our invitation quickly became a hot ticket.
The story of Passover is one of ancient redemption, of a mass exodus from slavery to freedom. But contemporary celebration had evolved to commemorate political, social, and personal redemptions of all stripes. On this equatorial island, we were surrounded and enveloped by people who had searched in one way or another for their own personal redemption and, like the Israelites, had simply picked up and left where they’d come from to arrive in a foreign land. Many had interesting stories to tell. Since one of the traditions of the Seder is to tell the story of redemption, it was the perfect setting for people to open up and share, even if it made them feel vulnerable.
We decked out our pad, incorporating Balinese culture and sensibility into our own traditions. We hired a small catering group to cook traditional Balinese fare while observing the special dietary restrictions of Passover. The group strewed vibrantly colored flower petals on the floors at the entrance of our home, and in the dining area, they served food on banana leaves in bamboo trays. We sat on floor cushions, Bali style, around low-slung tables. Throughout the property, Nyoman placed devotional offerings filled with incense and bits of food. Attire was Bali formal. For women, that meant a lacy blouse, sarong, and a sash tied over the top; for men, a white shirt and sarong. Balinese headdress was optional, but I wore a yarmulke.
The script, guide, and liturgy of the evening were laid out in the Haggadah, an ancient text, the bulk of which was recited before the festive meal. It could take hours to plow through. I didn’t want to torture the uninitiated with a drawn-out affair and was prepared to move things along quickly. But over the course of the service, each time I tried to rush, someone objected. Our guests were utterly curious and engaged, and they wanted more.
Sam especially wanted to keep it authentic. He and the other children had an opportunity to explain their own culture and respond to our guests’ questions. It made our kids feel special and built confidence in their own identities. They never had to describe their identities to anyone in New York; it was part of the air they breathed. They sometimes felt awkward keeping kosher at Green School, but now they felt proud.
As we progressed, some of our guests related their search for personal redemption. We knew their individual stories from vignettes we shared during mountain-bike rides or talks over a fresh coconut at the Green School’s warung. Bali attracted men and women who journeyed through their own personal wilderness. Some, like the ancient Israelites, were wanderers, although our guests were nomadic by choic
e and relished the excitement of living in new places. Others sought the spirituality and joy of the island, its beauty, and its complex, animistic culture. Still others had come to fix a troubled marriage, recover from a recent divorce, or deal with addiction. Many were simply burnt out from jobs or relationships that weren’t working.
Nobody found coming to Bali easy. The move invariably required courage to leave comforts of the familiar for the risk and promise of imagined deliverance. Most had to sacrifice something important to be on that island. They often left their extended families behind. For highly personal reasons, each had made a deliberate choice to live life differently than his or her peers, to live it as he or she wanted. Each found the bold choices to be empowering. Everyone had a story about why they’d pulled themselves out of the game and readily placed their cards, face up, on the table. If they hadn’t yet found redemption in Bali, they were certainly seeking it.
Sometimes their narrative involved something to do with work, but usually that was only a superficial element. Underneath, something was often going on in their personal or family lives. Some were escaping, others had come to reconnect with their immediate families, and still others were stretched too thin financially. One friend had mentally ill family members, and it was beyond his capacity to take care of them. If he’d tried, he believed he would have been swallowed whole. Living in Bali, even while making frequent trips home, was his way of coping.
That evening, our friends shared their stories without sugarcoating them. Vulnerability and tears were accepted. It was striking that nobody judged anybody else or tried to peg them on the socioeconomic ladder.
I too opened up. I told the story of my journey, my own search for redemption. Some of my relationships back home were troubling me, and despite my love and admiration for those people, perhaps I needed to change or shed the relationships. I wanted to refocus my priorities away from money, status, and title and recommit to my personal relationships, particularly my family, which had lacked my presence for too long. I needed a break from being driven by ambition and ego. I pulled at the hem of routine to refocus on creativity. And while I sought to still my stirring ego in order to live with greater compassion and gratitude, I wondered if, at the same time, it was possible also to engage fiercely and wholeheartedly. Could anyone live a harmonious and balanced life and simultaneously achieve great success?
