Take Off Your Shoes Read online

  Over and over, I had discussions with professionals in various industries who normally wore the masks required of them in their jobs but now suddenly revealed themselves and proclaimed that what they did for a living was not who they were in their souls. What surprised me most was not what these people said but the number of them who said it. So many of them did not have their whole hearts in their work, the very place they spent the bulk of their waking hours and adult years. They were not leading their lives as fully as they wanted.

  Then I checked one of our stock’s message board—always a mistake for any CEO who cares about affirmation, for there’s never any love on those boards. Not everyone was supportive. I suspected some were simply perplexed by my behavior. By walking away from a dream job and all its financial rewards, I was pulling at the hem of incentive systems that clothed many business relationships. It was difficult for some to understand.

  Some of the conversations I had were fraught and contentious. But I was already beginning to experiment with a new way of thinking and conducting myself. Grabbing as much as I could seemed at odds with a set of values I was only beginning to articulate to myself, the virtue in understanding the needs and wants of the people around me, even those with whom I competed. It was a value that rejected a zero-sum way of living—what goes into my pocket must necessarily come out of somebody else’s—in search of something more expansive. I was beginning to recognize that constantly striving to get ahead over the years slowly gnawed at a more humanistic set of values. Outwardly, I maintained a firm position, but I felt the edge had already begun to come off.

  One evening, walking down Broadway on my way home, I caught a few words of passersby talking on their phones as they hurried past. “I know, I’m late, I’m sorry.” “Sounds good, but I’ve got an evening meeting.” “Don’t drop the price yet; you’ll look desperate.” I’d never paid much attention to the conversations of strangers, mostly because I was almost always engaged in my own pointed discussion with some invisible person on the other end of a wireless connection. Suddenly, I became attuned not only to the world around me but also to my own behavior. The conversations I overheard often related to scheduling—social events, family, and meetings—or money, often in the context of real estate or other deals. Those phone conversations were just as my own had been, but my mindset had shifted. I took note and wondered how I must have sounded to others listening willy-nilly to my passing words. I wondered how many of my waking hours, including those spent wide eyed in the nighttime darkness of our bedroom, were spent focusing on matters that once were desperately urgent but now, suddenly, seemed mundane.

  Our travel plans firmed up. We slipped in a detour to Africa for a two-week safari. Africa was a place we’d fantasized about visiting, but we could never find the time. Now with Africa more or less on the route to Bali, we saw the opportunity and, with it, a way to get Nava, who loved animals, revved up about the trip.

  We had eight months of sabbatical ahead of us, which to me seemed like an enormous amount of time but to Victoria far too short. She knew that when we returned home, the pace of our lives would again become as relentless as it was now. She fretted that the time away would pass too quickly, and she desperately wanted us to slow down.

  I wondered aloud, as I often did, “But what am I going to do with my time?”

  Victoria had a quick retort: “You’re going to slow down. Maybe you’ll do nothing. If it means being bored, so be it. Boredom is a luxury.” The idea of doing nothing was difficult for me to bear.

  “What about you?” I said. “What will you do?”

  She seemed surprised I’d asked. Was I really that patriarchal?

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll have plenty to do.”

  One day, Oliver returned home from school. “My teacher yelled at me today. I felt bad. But then I thought, hey, only two more months and I’m outta here.”

  When Sam blithely mentioned to his best friend in school as they passed each other in the hallway that we would be moving to Indonesia, his friend said, “Okay,” then turned to call behind him, “Whoa! What?”

  In time, Rita saw our trip to Bali as an escape from a class of girls that bullied and pained her. “Do all girls everywhere act that way?” Her emotions were a mix of fear, excitement, and uncertain anticipation. They were also a bit raw.

  “We’ll find out,” Victoria said. Rita went along with our plans without complaint.

  As the clock wound down to the end of the year, I was feeling impatient about our detour to Africa. Trained and practiced in the management of setting goals and achieving them as efficiently as possible, I thought of our trip to Tanzania and Kenya as a distraction from our plan to escape to Bali. If we were going to take our sabbatical in Southeast Asia, I wanted to get there as quickly as possible. Two weeks of looking at animals in what I thought would be a large zoo, an inauthentic commercial attraction, was a tangent. Already uncertain about how I would engage myself in Bali, I could not imagine keeping myself occupied while bumping along in a jeep on the plains of the Serengeti. But other than for a bit of grousing to Victoria, I kept my mouth shut.

  We tied up loose ends and made last-minute preparations. Victoria dove into the details of visas, health forms for school, and packing up the family. She arranged to have most of our remaining belongings sent to storage to make room for the tenants who would be renting our apartment. She also told me, with a laugh and a searching look, that one of our neighbors had asked her in a whisper that day, “Is it too late for Ben to change his mind?”

  We inoculated ourselves against hepatitis and yellow fever. A few days before we left, Victoria, the kids, and I gathered in the kitchen and made a ceremony of taking our first doses of Malarone to protect us from malaria. We each raised a glass of water, popped the pill, and drank to our adventure ahead.

  The night before we left, I had dinner with one of my partners, Jordan. As I made my way to the nearby restaurant, light snowflakes shimmied to the ground, a precursor of a fierce blizzard that was making its way up the East Coast and threatened to block our escape from winter.

  There had been so much tension for me in my partnership that I welcomed the chance for casual conversation. We met in a small Greenwich Village restaurant. Jordan had an openness in conversation that others might find uncomfortable. Before we’d even ordered, he said, “You coming back?”

  “As I told the partners, I have every intention of returning.”

  He laughed. “A carefully worded answer. Do you think you really will?”

  The perspectives of time and distance often lead to insight that causes people to change course. I secretly hoped the sabbatical might light the way to a radical change in my life and my family’s and alter our lives permanently. Perhaps it would bring us to a different way of being. I did not know the answer. All I knew was that I needed some distance.

  I smiled and shrugged. “In these situations, one never knows.” I expected another laugh but got a thoughtful nod.

  At the end of the dinner, Jordan presented me with a small going-away gift, a Leatherman pocket multitool. “I figure you may need this on the road. You’ll be ready for anything.”

  I shot him a puzzled look. I got the feeling he didn’t know quite what to make of what I was doing. Still, in the context of his desire to grow the firm, I thought he wanted to ensure that the firm’s cofounder would return. In business, small gifts were common, often as a tool to establish a closer connection. I was touched by his gift and accepted it with gratitude. It reminded me that for all the economic reasons people enter into business, commerce is also a very human affair. It requires not only reason and analysis but also emotional intelligence, social skills, and deep personal engagement. Even if we didn’t see eye to eye about what I was about to do, it felt good to reaffirm our respect for each other.

  Snow was sticking to the ground in New York when we zipped up the last of our bags. I pulled my coat from the closet. Victoria took it from me—to hold it fo
r me to put on, I thought—but instead she hung it back in the closet.

  “Absolutely not.” Our packing list consisted only of light clothing.

  Out in the hallway, Victoria turned the key to lock our apartment. We called our children to each take a bag. They hesitated and argued about who would carry what, but ultimately, with some parental prodding, each grabbed a bag and hauled it down the elevator to the lobby. We got into a car that took us to JFK.

  We worked our way through traffic and then the airport to get to our gate while the snowfall grew heavier. As we waited for our flight to be called, we heard the words we feared. An agent announced our flight would be delayed. My heart sank, but half a second later, I recovered. There was no rush. For the first time in a long while, there was no place I needed to be. Although I had no interest in spending more time than necessary at the airport, I let the delay wash over me. I didn’t get tense or race to find an alternative flight scheduled to leave earlier. I just let it go.

  One hour later, through fierce snowfall, our plane’s wheels lifted off the runway, leaving behind a historic blizzard, one that would eventually drop twenty inches of snow and embroil the mayor’s office in a controversy about the speed of snow removal. When I read about it from afar, I was glad to have it in the rearview mirror.

  four |

  We flew from New York to Tanzania via Ethiopia. During our layover at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, Victoria found a quiet row of airport seats, settled in, and cracked open an enormous volume, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. The kids too pulled out some reading material. We had bought them Kindle readers precisely for situations like this. They were lightweight for travel but filled with material to keep the kids occupied.

  I was fidgety. I felt the impulse to reach into my pocket for my phone to check for emails, like an amputee’s urge to scratch a phantom limb. There were no messages. No deals, meetings, or conference calls. Colleagues from work no longer needed to be in touch with me. Suddenly untethered from the comfort and tyranny of constant contact, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I was free from my email in-box that seemed to refill as quickly as I decanted it, but I felt slightly lonely too. Instead of chatter, there was dead silence.

  I wandered around the airport, looking for something to buy, something to do. I searched for a coffee shop, hoping for a Starbucks. Instead, I found a dingy one filled with stale cigarette smoke. I continued on and came upon an ATM. When I inserted my card, an error message on the screen said that the machine was out of cash. I wandered some more, looking for a newsstand, but came up empty.

  When our flight was called after three long hours of fidgeting, it was a mad dash to the gate. Passengers swarmed and overwhelmed the gate attendant. Compared to this general chaos, JFK was a well-oiled machine. Tired and agitated, we eventually found our way to our seats.

  From Addis Ababa we traveled to Arusha, Tanzania, a gateway city to the Serengeti National Park. Our guide, Abu, with whom we had prearranged a pickup, met us at the airport. Dressed in khaki shorts, khaki boots, and a button-down khaki shirt, the slight Tanzanian man welcomed us warmly and led us toward the parking lot. On the way, I stopped at a telecom kiosk and bought a local prepaid SIM card for my phone. Victoria picked up some vegetarian ugali, a thick porridge of maize-meal flour and spinach-like greens. Although the other kids turned up their noses, Sam scarfed it down. His picky eating habits had their limits in the face of hunger.

  Abu showed us to his Land Rover, another vision in khaki, and we loaded our gear onto the roof. As we drove into town, Sam pointed to Mount Kilimanjaro off to the left. It shimmered in the far distance as it climbed slowly from the plains to a plateau, where snow covered its dormant volcanic cones. Its color metamorphosed from lavender to marine blue as it rose. I stared at it and thought about a friend who had recently climbed the mountain, and I imagined for a moment the challenge of climbing a mountain myself.

  Abu pointed to small sand tornadoes in the middle distance, swirling whirlwinds that sucked dust into their updrafts. Sam stared at the odd sight, lost in his own thoughts.

  When we arrived at our lodging and dumped our bags, I checked again for emails, but there was no wireless connection. The SIM card was useless. About to head into the wilderness with just my family and Abu, I was utterly cut off from my world back home.

  Before we headed into the national park, Victoria asked if we could visit a local school. We had wanted our trip to be educational for our kids, for them to understand environments vastly different from their own and how other kids lived in them.

  Abu took us to nearby Shepherds Junior School and introduced us to the principal, who gladly showed us around and brought us into a classroom to introduce us to the kids. Victoria stood at the head of the class.

  “Good morning, grade seven,” she said to a class of twenty-five kids, all in neat school uniforms.

  “Good morning!” they all answered in unison.

  Victoria led a discussion with the kids and directed their questions to our children. “What are your hobbies?” one child asked.

  “I play baseball,” Oliver said. Victoria demonstrated with an imaginary bat. When we moved on to a third-grade class, Victoria led a round of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” It was cute, and I was impressed to see how seriously the local kids seemed to take our visit.

  On the way back to our hotel, Nava tugged at Victoria and whined in a faux baby voice, “When are we going to see the animals, Mommy?”

  “Tomorrow, Nava. I promise. And you don’t need to talk in that voice.”

  The next day, Abu drove us to the national park. He rolled back the Land Rover’s canvas roof, and the park’s measureless azure sky opened to us. Grassy plains stretched as far as the horizon. As we bumped along the Serengeti, its vastness made me lightheaded. The plains, solitary and isolated, reminded me that I was as far from New York as I could have imagined.

  As we came upon a tower of giraffes, Abu stopped the car and killed the engine. In the profound absence of human noise, I listened to the sound of giraffes brushing against the bush and nibbling at leaves. They walked so awkwardly yet so beautifully. I stared at them and then turned my gaze to my children and Victoria. Oliver stared in awe. Nava whooped. They watched in wonder for a long while. I took as much pleasure in them as I did in the wildlife. Something was already changing in me, though I could not quite place it.

  Abu asked, “May I proceed?” The Land Rover shuddered and thrummed. We were off.

  Thirty minutes later Abu stopped, again cut the engine, and pointed toward two o’clock. “Do you see?” I didn’t. I was playing with the settings of our digital camera. “Keep looking,” he said as I lifted my gaze. A slight rustling crackled in the distance. The entire family shifted from their seats over to the right side of the vehicle and jostled for a good view. The sound grew into a more elaborate crunching, almost a racket. A herd of elephants emerged from the bush.

  The sheer size of the animals astounded me. Nava and Rita almost jumped for joy. Victoria froze. Nava quickly reached into her backpack and took out Eli, her stuffed elephant doll. She held Eli as high as her tiny three-foot frame allowed and yelled to the herd, “It’s your cousin!”

  Abu rolled his Rs in a thick Tanzanian accent. “May I proceed?” He kicked the vehicle into gear, and we lurched forward.

  Abu was an endearing man who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural history of the area. He spooled it out carefully so as not to overwhelm us, speaking deliberately and precisely. Every spoken word conveyed exactly the meaning he intended. He was simultaneously authoritative and polite. He was solicitous of us, especially of the children, but mostly he was interested in educating us about the wonders of the East African bush, the extraordinary mammal migrations, and their endless search for water and nutrition.

  As one day on safari bled into the next, the Serengeti and Ngorongoro parks worked their magic on all of us. Or almost all.

  A few days into our t
rip, Oliver became depressed. More than his siblings, he had an unusually close group of school friends, about four or five boys, whom he missed terribly. It was beginning to dawn on him that he wouldn’t see them for a long time. That he had his family to keep him company did not console him. With his birthday approaching and his head hung low, his demeanor was a stark contrast to that of his siblings, who were boisterous with excitement about the animals. The night of his birthday, I led him out of his tent toward the dining tent. The darkness outside was as black as Oliver’s mood. I heard a snort from an animal we could not see but sounded so close I could practically feel its breath.

  I said to Oliver in a low voice, “Quickly. Let’s move.” We hurried our pace and arrived at the lighted dining tent, about a hundred yards away. Our Maasai hosts greeted us, dressed in traditional red shuka fabric, cell phones attached to their hips.

  At dinner, Oliver was still feeling down. “How about a game of ghost?” Victoria said. It was a word game in which each player adds a letter to a word being formed. The string must be a fragment of a real word but not yet a whole word; the player who first forms a complete word loses the round. Oliver said, “Only if I don’t sit next to Sam.” Sam liked to prey on Oliver, thinking of letters that would force Oliver to lose.

  Sam opened the game.

  “M.”

  “M or N?” Victoria asked.

  “M, like Mets.”

  “That’s not helpful, Sam.”

  A group of servers ultimately came to Oliver’s rescue. Singing “Happy Birthday” in Swahili, they presented him with a small birthday cake, candles ablaze. As a reminder of the resiliency of children, a smile returned to Oliver’s face.