Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  twenty-four |

  It was mid-August when Victoria and I strolled along a dirt country lane in Putnam County, just north of New York City. The sun burned high, and the tall hemlocks threw mottled shadows. A woodpecker drummed against a nearby tree. As we ambled along at a Bali pace, a mosquito landed silently on my arm, and I felt its bite. I smacked it dead. “At least this one won’t kill me.” I was happy to be done with dengue fever, malaria, paratyphoid, and the monster’s ball of bugs that carried tropical disease.

  Victoria took my hand, and we interlaced our fingers. As we talked, I reminded her about a company retreat the following week, two weeks before I was set to return to work. “You’re still on sabbatical,” she said. “Once you get into a work mindset, it’s all over.”

  We had spent so many intimate family moments together that separating was difficult for both of us. For me especially, balancing personal wants with business needs was a return to a familiar conflict.

  “I know,” I said, “but it’s one thing not to attend an important meeting when I’m on the other side of the planet. It’s quite another to skip it when I’m a car ride away. Especially after I’ve been away for so long.”

  Even sabbaticals were impermanent. Victoria kissed my hand and then looked over at me. “Imagine us having this conversation a year ago, before Bali.”

  I thought for a moment and then laughed. “We’d be arguing.”

  A few days later, a black Suburban SUV arrived at my home, and I set off for a nearly three-hour ride to the hotel at which the company was holding the retreat, a converted Victorian-style mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean, the rambling structure and its vast grounds evoked old New England privilege. As we approached, I remembered the out-of-place feeling I had in Singapore and how far from Bali I was now.

  I unpacked and took in the ocean view before I needed to head out to meet my partners. We had a full agenda of activities planned: a long hike, some physical team-building exercises, followed by massages, cocktails, and dinner. But first we had a discussion session. It was standard fare: airing any contentious issues, a discussion of our performance relative to our goals and how we might fill any gaps.

  I left my room and met my partner Karl in the corridor heading to the meeting room. He wore sandals, I my flip-flops from Bali. My gait was much slower than his. He laughed. “Keep up, man!”

  The dark wood paneling of the meeting room dampened the ocean sunlight streaming in from the windows. I saw my other partners for the first time since leaving for Bali.

  “You back already?” Seymour asked. “Where’d the time go?”

  Sabbatical, I realized, was an exercise in relativity. Our new experiences and the emotions attached to them created new memories and changed our characters. Time had passed slowly for me and my family. It was so thick and heavy we could nearly grip it. But for my professional colleagues who were engaged in the daily routines of work and home, their more linear stretch of time marched ahead briskly like soldiers on parade. Routine made their lives easier—they didn’t have to think about or choose what to do next. Habit took over, hiding the passage of time and draining it from awareness.

  I turned to one of the assistants, who brought me a box I had shipped from Bali. In it were desk ornaments I had commissioned from a Balinese artist. They were bronze bulls, reminiscent of both Bali’s Hindu traditions and Wall Street’s symbol of confident optimism. On the belly of each bull, hidden from obvious view, I had inscribed, “After Ten Years, Still Bullish.” It had required a lot of planning and was meant to reassure myself and my partners that, despite my temporary departure, I was still sanguine about the firm’s prospects. In a way, I returned the favor of Jordan’s Leatherman multitool gift the December night before we bolted from the New York blizzard.

  Reactions were muted. The partnership was eager to get on with business.

  Over the next hour or two, I listened to updates on our investments and a review of the opportunities we were considering. I was interested in the subject matter but somehow could not connect. My mind, still stuck somewhere in a southern sea, was unable to shift quickly into business mode.

  On the hike the next day, I chitchatted with various partners. Some expressed more interest in my experience than others. At one point I walked alongside Strauss, and we chatted about inconsequential things. I overheard one of my partners say, “Oh, good. Mom and Dad are talking.”

  When I returned home, we got down to the business of setting up for school and work. I packed away my shorts and T-shirts and pulled out my suits and button-down dress shirts. I stared at my collection of neckties and swallowed hard. I put my flip-flops in a closet and pulled out my polished brogues, the ones with the narrow toe box. I tried them on. They hurt when I tightened the laces. I tried a different pair, but those also pinched. It was as if my feet had expanded to fill the space I had created in Bali. I settled on a pair of simple black oxfords with thin leather soles.

  “How are you feeling about galloping back into the fray?” Victoria said.

  “Feels more like I’m about to sleepwalk my way back in.” I knew the situation was charged, but I nonetheless hoped to change it.

  She took my hand. “You’re very lucky to have what you have, you know.” I took a moment to appreciate that. And I saw the sense and opportunity in returning to the firm, even as I felt a nagging yearning for something new.

  With a stab of chagrin, I realized I wasn’t the only one experiencing reentry. “How about you?” I said. “What’s next?”

  She squeezed my hand and smiled. “The community center is doing fine without me.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “And pretty soon, the kids will no longer need a full-time mommy. I want to go back to work, outside the nonprofit world this time.” She’d given up a career to raise a family.

  “And do what?”

  “That’s the thing. I’m going to look around for something.”

  One Monday that September, after my morning meditation, I dressed in a pinstriped suit and trekked three miles from my downtown apartment to my office in Midtown. Having lived footloose for so long, I couldn’t bear the claustrophobia of a crowded, sweltering, New York City subway. I committed to walking to and from work as long as the weather held.

  Settling into my office, I reacquainted myself with my assistant. I had an out-of-place feeling that reminded me of when, decades earlier, I started a new job at a new company and could barely find the men’s room.

  After only a few weeks, I received a call from a headhunter asking me if I was interested in a CEO post they were trying to fill. I was gratified that sabbatical did not seem to diminish my prospects and asked for details. The company had a lot of elements that were attractive to me: it was public, a leader in its industry, and profitable. It had a healthy amount of cash and little debt. It was facing significant issues of transitioning from analog to digital media and had been challenged in its efforts to expand internationally. Both areas were strong suits for me.

  I told the headhunter that I was interested so long as my firm could also invest in the company. There was no other way for me to both take the position and remain a partner in my firm. Nor was I ready to choose between the two. At the end of a series of interviews with the controlling shareholder, they said, “We want you, but we don’t need or want any further investment in the company.” If I wanted the position, I would have to leave the partnership. I wasn’t ready for that. I was holding on. There had to be a way.

  I checked in with my doctor, Frieda Gu. My health stats that had been pushing into the uncomfortable zone before my sabbatical were back in normal range. Over the course of our time away, I had lost nearly twenty pounds, weighing in at a hair over one-sixty-two. My daily yoga practice had transformed my body; I was more lithe and flexible than I had ever been.

  “How did you do it?” Frieda asked.

  “Mostly, I paid attention.”

  I wasn’t eati
ng on the run, eating standing up, or breathlessly arriving late at a dinner table with thoughts about work still racing through my mind. I wasn’t snacking while working on the next deal, product offering, or investor conference. I wasn’t distracted by the smell of fresh pastry wafting into the street from a sidewalk café. Instead, I fully chewed my food. I noticed the tastes and smells of what I was eating. I sat with my family and ate home-cooked meals in an environment free of marketing messages encouraging me to be hungry for more.

  I asked Dr. Gu to look into the pain in my left foot. She sent me for an X-ray and, when that showed nothing, an MRI. It turned out that walking to and from work wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had. My feet didn’t respond well to the pounding on New York’s hard, unforgiving ground. The MRI showed a fracture in the left sesamoid, a small bone embedded in the tendon of the foot. Merging shoeless Bali and concrete New York was proving more difficult than I had imagined.

  One day, as autumn turned to winter, I arrived at my office in a foul mood. Freezing rain chopped through Midtown’s canyons and wrecked the morning commute. My fingertips were red from the cold and my toes wet from a puddle I had stepped into.

  I shook my umbrella dry and settled into my office chair. I was watching the rainwater sluice down the windowpane of my office and grumbling to myself about the city when I recalled a snippet of wisdom I’d picked up in Asia. I tapped my computer keyboard and pulled up a video lecture I’d seen by a French molecular geneticist turned photographer, author, and Buddhist monk named Mathieu Ricard. In a study on the connection between meditation and happiness, however that was measured, Ricard scored higher than any person previously observed. Researchers dubbed him the “happiest man in the world.”

  At my desk, I again listened to Ricard talk about one of his theories of the mind. Contrary to what some psychologists say about feeling multiple emotions simultaneously, Ricard believed that one emotion could crowd out another. “You cannot, with the same hand, both shake a man’s hand and punch him in the face.” Emotion could be deliberately chosen. He proposed that the antidote to sadness is an act of loving kindness. “If you’re in a bad mood,” he said, “go save a child’s life.”

  I pressed the space bar on my computer to pause the video and reflected for a moment. Then in an act of utter grandiosity and self-interest, I opened a new tab in my Chrome browser and typed into the Google search box, “save a child’s life.” At the bottom of the screen was a group in Israel I’d not heard of called Save a Child’s Heart, a medical charity that treated children with congenital heart disease from the Palestinian territories and underdeveloped countries around the world. An American pediatric cardiologist and surgeon, who later died while climbing the dormant volcanic cones of Mount Kilimanjaro, had founded it. While not small, the costs of treatment were a fraction of what they would be in the United States. I paused and took a moment to consider. With a few clicks on my keyboard, I entered my credit card information and made a commitment to help save a child’s life.

  I’d never done anything like that before. Perhaps as a result of compassion meditation practice, I was behaving more altruistically.

  I recognized the hidden gift of Save a Child’s Heart entering my world. Here was an unambiguous force for good in a part of the world that desperately needed it, a region where everything is nuanced and nothing is simple, where kindness among warring peoples is rare but possible. If our trip to Bali was a process of disengagement, just as I was now struggling to re-engage, Save a Child’s Heart was an on-ramp to meaning that I could integrate into my life without having to forgo other ambitions. It was a ballast of compassion to counter the tilt of striving in a business career.

  When I told the executive director what prompted me to make the initial donation, he asked, “Are you in a better mood?” I told him Ricard was right.

  But I also wondered if I had become too, well, soft. Yoga, meditation, drawing, family, kids, charity. Maybe I needed to man up. While I didn’t start eating raw meat for breakfast, at least not every day, I tried to recultivate a more aggressive business approach and reestablish my corporate machismo.

  I continued to search for new investment opportunities. But in meetings, I felt that although I was in the room, I wasn’t present. I felt I no longer belonged. That should have told me everything I needed to know. Over time, I again began to lose sleep and see some expansion in my waistline. I felt myself backsliding. My inner voice told me I’d forgotten all the wisdom I’d gained in Bali and simply jumped back into a situation that obviously was wrong for me. I had made the wrong choice.

  Then just before Thanksgiving, Strauss asked me to join him for a cup of coffee near Take-Two’s office. We met at Balthazar, a French-styled bistro and a stalwart of the SoHo scene. It was late in the day, not quite dinnertime, and the restaurant had few customers. We took a small, round table. Strauss wasn’t smiling.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said and cleared his throat. “The guys don’t think this is working.”

  Despite having been ready to have this discussion before I left for Bali, at this moment I found myself unprepared. I felt my pulse quicken as my amygdala triggered. I drew my attention to the emotion and breathed in to regain my sense of time, place, and balance. Slow down. Create space.

  I asked for clarification. I knew the way the firm worked and that while consensus was important, the last word belonged to Strauss. “You’ve told me what the guys want,” I said. “What do you want?” I pressed down with my big toe to feel the ground beneath me.

  He paused. “I’d like to turn over another card.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I could see his discomfort, even distress. He said, “I’d like to think about it. I want you to do the same. We need to figure out a different sort of relationship.”

  He was trying to navigate through a delicate situation. I knew because I’d been on the other side of this conversation many times. When someone is ambivalent about being part of the organization, as I was, everybody knows it. Ambivalent people communicate their hesitancy in any number of verbal and nonverbal ways. It’s impossible to fake intention.

  We talked some more and said some very personal things to each other. Some were born out of anger, others of genuine affection. When we ran out of things to say, our waiter was nowhere to be seen, and an awkward silence settled over us like a sulfurous murk. I stood up. “I don’t want to make this any more difficult than it already is. So I’m going to leave and let you pay for the coffee.” He nodded. I walked out into the dark of that early November evening.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk home. Rush-hour traffic had begun to build. Broadway was a river of headlights. Amid the honking horns and the roar of trucks and buses fighting for advantage before the next light turned red, I called Victoria. She knew that I was seeing Strauss and heard the tension in my voice. She asked, “Is everything okay?”

  I raised my voice to be heard above the noise. “Sort of.”

  “Good news or bad news?”

  I was surprised by my response. “A little bit of both.” When I got home, Victoria and I talked for an hour.

  After dinner with the kids, Rita asked, “Daddy, want to hear a song I wrote with Michael?” Michael was our children’s music teacher whom Victoria credited with bringing music into our home and lives.

  “Definitely.”

  She grabbed her guitar, sat on a chair in my bedroom, and sang a melodic riff:

  When the weather’s got you blue,

  I’ll always be standing next to you

  In the pouring rain.

  All you gotta do is call my name,

  And I’ll be there when you need me.

  I’ll take your hand; I’ll show you the way.

  When the sun doesn’t look like it will rise,

  I’ll be there to dry your eyes.

  When you want it all to end,

  I’ll teach you how to fight and defend.

  I’ll be there when you need me,

  I’ll take your ha
nd,

  I’ll show you the way.

  I’ll stand by you tonight,

  I’ll hold you close and tight.

  Let your tears fall

  ’Cause I’ll be here forever and more.

  Rita had developed instinctive empathic sense, and her timing could not have been better.

  The next day I went to the Midtown office and started my morning by answering emails. I walked down the corridor to get some tea. When I passed by Strauss’s office, he asked me to step in.

  “I know what I want,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “I do too.”

  I had a fantasy of an arrangement that would keep me involved in a more passive role and protect my economic interests but grant me independence to pursue my own activities. It was my dream deal, and I thought it fit the realistic parameters of what could be agreed to. Remarkably, my model was close to what was on Strauss’s mind.

  In the days that followed, I retreated to the sanctuary of my yoga mat and meditation cushion. I returned to my barefoot practice in order to reground myself. My mind was far from the equanimity I sought to cultivate, but when I sat on my cushion or stood on my mat, I was immersed in an expansive calm. Having paid the premiums of a daily practice well in advance, I cashed in on my meditation insurance policy. I accepted the turbulence as transitory. Sometimes I even thought of it as a gift. I deliberately cultivated gratitude for my experiences. I focused on compassion for myself and my colleagues. In my mind, I forgave everyone, including myself, for having arrived at a place that never was anybody’s intention. The path of forgiveness was powerful and led straight to the doorstep of serenity.

  I realized that I was attached to my firm, had clung to it longer than I should have, and had succumbed to a stronger preference for avoiding losses rather than acquiring gains. It was a natural tendency, first described by economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, called loss aversion. The fear of loss led to the rope burn of holding on for too long and too tightly to something that was inevitably slipping away. The balm was mostly in the conscious awareness of the phenomenon.