Take Off Your Shoes Read online

  Left? I had left Take-Two but had seen my time away as a sabbatical rather than a departure. I shared some of what I had been thinking when I stepped down, that I needed a break and that the pursuit of success—the burning desire to reach ever higher—had, at least for the moment, broken down for me. There was always something more to accomplish or more success to be had. I couldn’t quite articulate it, and I wasn’t sure he understood what I said, although he said he did, even if he didn’t see things the same way.

  When the waiter brought the check, Hubert picked it up. As I walked out, I felt amped up by talking business amid a big city with its noise and energy, but it quickly faded with the realization that it was vicarious. I was now an outsider looking in.

  I rejoined my family in our hotel lobby, and we set out to tour the city. Cars and trucks sped past in a fury as we walked to Chinatown and Little India. We bought a printer and other provisions we couldn’t easily find in Bali. Shopping for computer supplies in that bustling electronics store was far from the sanctuary I sought. After only a few weeks in Bali, away from any commercial hubbub, all of a sudden I was back in the thick of things.

  That Sunday, we boarded our flight at four thirty in the afternoon and returned via the same route. I used the travel time to read, soaking in more information on meditation and the brain science behind it, still taken by the idea that thoughts shape the brain as much as the brain shapes thoughts.

  As we prepared for our descent, the pilot got on the PA and asked passengers to fasten their seat belts. And then: “Ladies and gentlemen, the possession and trafficking of drugs are serious offenses in Indonesia and carry the death penalty. Don’t get involved.” Sam gave me an odd look and then laughed. It was a shocking thing to hear. I thought a few people might get up to use the toilet at that point, but everyone stayed in their seats. I guessed they knew the drill.

  By the time we landed, we were ready to be back in Bali. Oliver said that Singapore was cool for a while, but he really just wanted to get back to Ubud, where everything was green, small, and inexpensive; where roads, architecture, and merchandise were not so straight-edged, linear, and shiny; where he didn’t have to get up early and wander around a strange city.

  I knew how he felt. I was happy to be back too.

  nine |

  More than one month since we had arrived in Bali, we began to settle into a daily routine. At seven thirty each morning, Victoria woke the girls, and I rousted the boys by opening the blinds and plucking the earplugs from Sam’s ears. When they opened their eyes, they could see, through the glass door, Nyoman in his sarong, roaming the yard, placing offerings and lighting incense.

  We ate breakfast outdoors, typically freshly cut fruit and yogurt. Sometimes we Skyped with family back home, taking advantage of the brief window the thirteen-hour time difference afforded us. When we were done, Nyoman drove the kids to school. Sometimes we joined them, but not always. There were days when we just waited for the ants to arrive. Full battalions showed up to remove any crumbs from the patio. If the take was large, reinforcements arrived. Their columns often stretched from one end of the property to the other. They didn’t mess with us, and we returned the courtesy.

  Victoria and I spent an hour or so catching up on emails and generally taking care of business. I had anticipated a steady if dwindling number of emails and calls from Take-Two and my partners and was at first relieved there were so few. Then I began to miss the connection and even feel alarmed that they had adapted so quickly to functioning without me.

  Victoria was still getting a lot of emails and calls from her former organization. I joked one day that this was supposed to be her sabbatical too.

  She smiled. “But mainly yours.”

  For a second or two, I tried to brew up a bantering comeback, until her meaning washed over me and spun my perspective around to a new and humbling angle. Although we had discussed our uprooting as a family adventure, I had been the one most in need of a break. I had to be fixed before any other remedies could bite.

  Most mornings, after checking emails, we motorbiked down to Denise’s yoga class. In time, my yoga practice improved. My flexibility, strength, and balance developed. I easily centered on my breath and found myself in that concentration. I focused on the four corners of each of my feet touching and pressing into the mat. In warrior poses, I felt the strength and the solidity of my body as if it was an immovable object prepared and willing to stand fast against any force. For long breaths at a time, I held my ground.

  Sometimes, I looked over at Victoria. For her, yoga was a way to keep fit and healthy rather than a spiritual or even religious practice. But it was becoming something more for me as the tension that had built up over the years slowly seeped out of me like groundwater. I wondered where else it might take me.

  We ate two-dollar lunches in town, sometimes with friends from Green School, other times alone. We strolled the art galleries and museums or simply returned to the villa to read before it was time to pick up the kids from school.

  Ben’s Organic Farm made home deliveries, and Putu’s mother joined her daughter periodically to prepare Balinese dishes for dinner. She made gado gado, a salad of slightly boiled or steamed vegetables and hard-boiled eggs served with a peanut dressing; nasi campur, white rice with small portions of vegetables and coconut fritters; and nasi goreng, simple fried rice.

  Most evenings we read, watched a movie, or played board games. By ten o’clock, it was lights out.

  I had underappreciated how much time Victoria and I would spend together on sabbatical. Stripped of our New York trappings and the pressures of home and work, there was no place for me to hide. We shared every meal and almost every activity. Sometimes we got frustrated with each other, and it was not always pretty. But we knew we’d made brave decisions and conquered our beyond-this-point-there-be-dragons mentality. We had made a deliberate choice to take time out to invest in our relationships and ourselves. Together, we were committed to pushing the frontier of experience.

  One evening, I made my way to Yoga Barn for their evening Tibetan Singing Bowl Meditation class. I arrived ten minutes early to secure a spot, removed my shoes, and walked into the same studio in which Victoria and I practiced power yoga. Instead of Denise standing in the front of the room, Swami Arun sat there cross-legged and dressed entirely in white. His hair was a Medusa’s tangle of long dreadlocks tied at the crown of his head so that they sprouted like a large shock of crabgrass. In a semicircle before him, he placed about a dozen metallic bowls of various sizes.

  Arun asked the participants to grab yoga mats and lie on their backs in a semicircle in front of him, heads toward the center. He picked up a mallet in each hand and tapped either side of the bowls, creating a soft gong-like sound. Then he repeated that for the other bowls, producing a symphony of reverberating gongs. By rubbing the mallet around the outside edge of the rim of the bowl, he created a high-pitched harmonic sound. Arun stood, holding a small cushion in his hands, on top of which he placed a midsized bowl. He brought the singing bowl around the room. When he came to me, he placed it first next to my right ear and then the left.

  There was no particular melody to the sounds of the bowls, but I found them deeply relaxing. Arun asked us to close our eyes as he continued to work the singing bowls, creating a symphony of vibration, an invitation to let go of my thoughts and succumb to relaxation. I remembered the instruction I had received at the ashram and tried to be aware of my thoughts, tried to watch them, almost clinically, as if they were secretions of my mind. But the room was dark, I was lying flat on my back, and Arun’s voice was too soothing. Within minutes, I was fast asleep.

  I awoke after about twenty minutes to the sound of a large gong. The other people in the class had fallen asleep too and were now stirring. I pushed myself up from the floor, crossed my legs, and sat a few minutes longer. Then I bowed my head as instructed and stumbled out of the room in a semislumber.

  On my motorbike headed home, I grew concerned
that meditation in Bali was inaccessible for someone like me. Where was the peace of meditation without the weirdness? Where was I supposed to connect with the wisdom of meditation without succumbing to swamis, ashrams, and religious experiences?

  By the time I powered down my bike in front of our home, I abandoned the idea of taking classes or learning from a teacher. Instead, I decided to turn to established experts. That approach had seemed to work for me many times before both personally and professionally. Thankfully and ironically, they were easily available on one of those electronic devices from which I had sought sanctuary, the Kindle.

  Our home was one of the lucky few with a consistent if slow Wi-Fi connection, and I downloaded volume after volume, looking for pointers on various meditation practices. The first was the most impactful. Joyful Wisdom was written by a Buddhist monk with a light touch and a sense of humor. He’d been born with what would later be labeled severe anxiety disorder, which he overcame through meditation. I went on to read everything by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Dan Siegel, and Richard Davidson. Sitting uncomfortably cross-legged on cushions, I listened to guided meditation podcasts by Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg.

  Through research, I learned that mindfulness meditation was not prayer. There was no deity, no praise, honor, or supplication. There was neither asking for help nor seeking answers. Meditation was prayer’s opposite. It taught the practitioner simply to be, without praise or judgment.

  Nor was meditation relaxing in the way that, for example, a massage was relaxing. Meditation required concentration. It required an upright spine and alertness. Letting the mind drift off in a relaxed state defeated the purpose. And yet, as a result of focused attention, the end of a meditation practice resulted in a refreshed sensation.

  I learned that to sit in silence alone with my thoughts was to observe them dispassionately and nonreactively. As thoughts came and went, there was an infinitesimal moment between them, like the space between frames in an old movie reel or the frames in a graphic novel. That empty, miniscule instant between one thought and the next was a tiny, quiet moment of peace. My aim was to stretch that empty space, to slow down transitions of thoughts so that the in-between bits were more pronounced, less like the space between fast-moving movie frames and more like the turning of a page in a book. The goal of meditation was not to empty my mind of thoughts—that would be impossible—but to be so aware of them that I could experience fully the space between them. It was a gigantic goal, and I accepted that it was likely to be an aspirational one that could easily be pursued over a lifetime.

  I learned too that in meditation, as in many other situations, failure is unavoidable. While the basic technique of meditation is focusing attention on the breath, inevitably attention wanders to any number of distractions. And when it does, attention breaks down. In that way, meditation was an exercise in failure. But failure fed recovery, and the recovery in meditation was both easy and constructive. The critical moment came in the instant of recognizing the wandering mind and bringing attention back to the breath and refocusing. Meditation was a cycle of losing and regaining attention, of failure and recovery.

  In one of my early sessions, I learned a lesson for the businessperson, more than just the old saw that failure is part of the process. Thoughts of past failures and missed goals kept intruding into my mind. I got caught up in the first two or three digressions but was able to quickly refocus on my breath, and I felt stronger. I realized, without dwelling in it, that each of those “failures” had led to recovery and each recovery to strength. Later I read that Dweck, the Stanford psychologist, had discovered that the entrepreneur or professional who does not accept failure as an inevitable outcome of trying and learning, who adopts an attitude of judgment and criticism or labels career experiences as either failures or successes, is less likely to recover, develop, and grow. For that person, failure is an unacceptable outcome from which recovery is not a learning experience. Failure is a sin from which redemption can only be wrought through yet more success. Whether failure translates to a growth experience often depends on one’s frame of mind.

  I thought back to my decision to take a break from my career and how concerned I was that some might have construed it as failure. I needed to remind myself that I had voluntarily walked away from my job and possibly from some close relationships that were deeply important to me. In meditation, I cultivated a mindset that did not require my attachment to success. I needed to do the hard work of changing the wiring of my mind, of noticing when I felt like a failure and shifting my thoughts, if only slightly, to construct a different narrative, one that included a sense of growth, discovery, and new experience.

  An underlying aspect of meditation gradually became more and more clear to me. It’s a practice, not a single event. My experience at the ashram was set up to fail. It was impossible to have a meaningful experience, religious or otherwise, simply sitting with eyes closed, listening to a man in a sarong playing the sitar. What was required was a dedication to sit daily, if only for a few minutes, with the intention of being still with my thoughts. It could take years of daily practice for meditation to have its effect. The brain does not change overnight. The investment in meditation was not a few minutes. It was a few minutes each day for many, many days over months and years. Meditation was like an insurance policy, small premiums paid regularly over a long time that brought both a little peace of mind and, in the event of a crisis, a lot of help, even salvation.

  I started a daily practice. It was a struggle, but I kept it up. Someday, I thought, I might need to harvest my investment.

  One afternoon, a few weeks after the Tibetan singing bowl session, I waited at the Green School warung to pick up my kids. John Hardy was giving another one of his campus tours with Ben McCrory at his side. He was walking past the mepantigan, a large mud pit where the school staged a monthly local martial arts performance of fire, dance, and drama set to gamelan music. “We take a mud-between-the-toes approach to education. Creativity here is as important as literacy.”

  There were times at Green School when creativity seemed more important than literacy, to say nothing of math and science. Still, I was impressed by John. He was like other people I knew who were brilliant but, because they couldn’t perform well at school or had a learning disability, believed they weren’t. Here was a man who had clear talent and vision yet had to find work-around strategies for traditional success.

  I surmised that by developing Green School, John was attempting to heal his own childhood experience of suffering at the hands of an uncaring and ignorant educational system. He built the school he wished he’d attended. Green School’s struggle with its curriculum reflected its founder’s early struggle with core subjects. Still, John’s inner call for social justice, with a particular focus on environmental awareness and the impact of humans on the planet and its resources, was impressive. “When my grandchildren ask me what I did about the planet we’re destroying, I want to have a good answer,” he once said.

  John excused himself, turned the tour over to Ben to continue, and headed my way. With a hand on my shoulder, he led me away from the others. “Ben, I’d love to have you on our board of directors.”

  Before he could say another word, I stopped and shook my head. “I’m flattered, but no, thanks. I’ve just pulled myself away from all that.”

  He seemed a little taken aback by my knee-jerk response, and so was I.

  “I hope you won’t mind if I ask you again in a couple of months.”

  I laughed, mostly to ease the awkwardness. “Sure. Who knows?”

  “Now I have an offer you can’t refuse. A bunch of us are going on a mountain-bike trip to Java. It would be great if you could join.” At sixty-one, John was a strong cyclist. He was heavy, but his legs were powerful. On local outings of the Green School Cycling Club, he was always at the head of the pack.

  I had mixed feelings about leaving my family during a time I’d committed to spending with them. Still, I felt the pull of
getting to know John better as well as the other parents of the Green School community. And spending a few days of exercise outdoors on a mountain bike held strong appeal. But John was the major draw. He was a highly creative force; if anyone else had asked, I would have declined on the spot.

  John was working with another Green School parent, Jon, to arrange accommodations, travel, and transportation of our bikes. Peter, the Canadian journalist, would take videos with his GoPro helmet cam. John and Jon had hired two local guides to help us navigate our way from our start in Lake Bedugul, a mountain vacation spot about an hour’s drive north of Ubud; to the Ijen volcano complex in West Java; then on toward the city of Malang; and finally to Surabaya to catch a flight home.

  For all my talk about family time, I wasn’t sure why I was so tempted to go on this trip. Since there was no way to bring the kids along, it would mean I’d be away from them and Victoria for a few days. Life after sabbatical would likely involve as much business travel as before, and I remembered all those awkward times I’d approached Victoria and my children with, “I need to travel; I’m not going to be home for a few days.” Those conversations were tough even as they became routine. It hurt me to see disappointment in Victoria’s eyes.

  After dinner, I pulled Victoria aside. The kids were working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Sydney Opera House that we had bought in Singapore. I explained about the bike trip. “What do you think?”

  She gave me that sigh I used to get when I told her I’d be away on business. She had left a professional career when Rita was born, surrendering to the realization that she could not do or have it all—career, husband, kids, the home. My trips reminded her that she was the mom while I was the traveler, and it was a sore point. Each time I told her about an upcoming trip, I felt I was slipping a stiletto between her ribs, and I braced myself for a quick spark of resentment. I felt guilty for forcing her inner conflict to the fore.