Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  I paused for a moment. Was I making Victoria or the kids uncomfortable with my confessional? Victoria gave me a warm smile. Sam raised his eyebrows as if telling me to get on with it. Oliver was inscrutable. Rita seemed deep in thought. Nava was fiddling with something on the table. At least none of my family looked horrified or mortified.

  “I chose to make a change in my life and come here. But it was a choice I had a lot of help with.” I looked at Victoria. “I had to be pushed.” We smiled at each other and got a few laughs. “But after I got here, I chose to continue to change. I have a greater sense of personal power—or maybe responsibility is a better word—from making a thoughtful choice. To deliberately cultivate a sense of happiness and not allow myself to be carried along by the currents of my life or to be a slave to it.” I quietly acknowledged, as if to convince nobody but myself, the temporary nature of our stay in Bali and that permanent escape was not redemption and certainly not a viable strategy even if the fantasy was tempting.

  I read a poem by David Whyte, self-proclaimed poet laureate to the corporate world. Whyte generally wrote about the self in the context of family and work, and especially about navigating the waters of extraordinary experience, fierce engagement, and turning points. His leitmotif was wholeheartedness, and he published “Fire in the Earth,” a poem that spoke to me. In it, he evoked Moses at the burning bush. At one of his readings, as Whyte tells it, an Orthodox Jewish student approached and suggested to Whyte that the Hebrew verb that the Bible employs when God says to Moses, “Take off your shoes!” is the same verb that is used to describe an animal shedding its skin. As Moses passes into a new life—an utterly new existence from the one he has known—he needs first to shed, to molt, to remove the skin that no longer serves him in order to don a truer veneer.

  In shedding my busy life, I seized the opportunity to reconnect with my ground of being, my ground of awareness. When I reconnected with important relationships, I realized that, like Whyte’s Moses, I had been standing on holy ground all along. I needed to shed parts of an older life in order to reemerge into something new, even if I had yet to define what that was.

  “I have struggled to let go of my ego, my sense of self being at the center of things. Why do we continuously attempt to fill our lives only with those things that we like and banish those that we don’t? It’s as if we stamp experience with ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ icons. Thumbs up, thumbs down.” It all seemed like an endless path with no possible destination. I tried to let go, at least for a while, of my burning desire to succeed and realized that I didn’t need more than I already had and that I could accept or deal with whatever came my way.

  Although I knew there was a difference between redemption and escape, I had not resolved which applied to me. I considered that perhaps Bali was about neither escape nor redemption but simply renewal. If so, would my life really be different when I returned to New York?

  The Seder lasted six hours, and the last guest left at one o’clock in the morning.

  Poor Nava was bored by all the adult talk and half asleep by the time it was over. Rita seemed to bask in the peaceful gathering. Oliver, still buoyed by this recent expedition, said, “Wow, Daddy, this sabbatical is a big deal, isn’t it?”

  Sam listened raptly but had little to say until the next day. “I had no idea. It’s like you’re showing me how I should live my life.”

  We woke late the next morning when the sun already hung high. My brother suggested we go for a walk through rice fields, which lay beyond the spring that ran behind our villa. We descended the steep steps, cut from local lava stone, and made sure to hold on to the handrail so as not to slip on the wet moss. Intricately carved stone spouts spit spring water from the hillside into the large stone stalls in which the locals bathed and collected water for their homes. We climbed the steps on the opposite side of the ravine. As we turned to stroll through a rice field, a boy carrying a towel smiled as he passed us on his way to bathe below.

  I asked my brother, “Why go back to New York? Why don’t I just stay? I’m as happy here as I’ve ever been.” I was kidding around, but it suddenly hit me that it was true. A sense of impending loss settled over me.

  I’d had many conversations with Victoria about lengthening our stay. Our time in Bali had been filled with moments of breathless joy, and like Cinderella, we wished we could dance a little while longer. The food tasted better. Sleep was deeper. Each day felt like a gift. I thought I’d discovered something profound. I connected to critical relationships in my life. I recognized that the basic needs, drives, and desires of people were all the same: they wanted to suffer less and enjoy more. I was grateful for what I had and didn’t want more. For the first time in many, many years, I felt awake. Without being pulled simultaneously in multiple directions, I felt fully present in time and place.

  “Easy for you to stay,” my brother said, “but what about your kids? Bali isn’t real life. What will they be equipped for when they wander out into the world?”

  It took my brother to remind me that I had a responsibility to my children beyond spending time with them. First was to provide them with a strong education, the kind that was difficult to make up for once the time for it had passed. Victoria and I had bought into Green School’s premise that a formal education designed to build a workforce for the industrial age may fade into irrelevance in a world of constant change, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and smart robots. Although our sabbatical was a priceless piece of education on its own, I was now thinking about formal education. Whether it was exposure to science, music, language, or sports, their lives were enhanced by the first-rate education available in New York City. If many families had come to Bali for six months and ended up staying for three years, other families left because the children weren’t getting the education they needed or were falling behind in core educational subjects, at least as measured by commonly accepted standards. Being progressive and creative may be necessary, but I didn’t think it was sufficient. And the value of being an educated individual lay far beyond acquiring any technical or creative skill.

  Things began to sink in. I spoke to local friends too about the struggle we felt. Some of them were speechless at the notion of choosing the quality of our children’s education over our own happiness. We understood it wasn’t a simple trade-off between being happy and being unhappy. After all, we’d hardly been miserable in New York. We had to take a longer view.

  I went home that night and told Victoria about my conversation. She reminded me—as if I need to be reminded—that we also had family back home. Our parents were already into their senior years. We needed to be around. The practicalities of life kept us from staying in Bali. If we stayed longer, I could imagine my partners losing patience with me, and I wouldn’t have blamed them. While taking a sabbatical was normal to me now, I suspected that it still seemed wacky back home. And there was a natural limit to the length of a leave of absence. In any event, I was not prepared to sacrifice education and family in order to live as a modern-day lotus-eater.

  In the end it was Sam who, at fifteen years old, was wise enough to bring it all home: “I want to stay too, but I know I need to go back.” He was a good student and wanted to go to a good college. He knew his high school back home was equipped to prepare him for that goal and guide him. As exciting as Green School was, he needed something different from what it had to offer. And what was true for Sam was true for all of us. We wanted to stay but knew we had to return.

  It was May, and our time in Bali was drawing to a close when Victoria and I traveled an hour to the village of Klungkung to visit another artist, Nyoman Gunarsa. Gunarsa was better known than Karja, more tied to traditional Balinese symbolism, and deeply committed to Bali’s cultural heritage. Already in his seventies and walking with pain, Gunarsa gave us a tour of his studio and family compound. He led us through his own private museum of traditional Balinese artifacts and showed us a temple he was building for his family. But it was his pai
ntings that we were mostly interested in, having seen many of them in Ubud’s museums.

  Gunarsa’s works were colorful and lyrical. They depicted Balinese dancers and musicians that evoked rhythm and symmetry. He too was concerned with energy. He moved quickly and worked with bold colors. Sometimes he applied paint directly from the tube to the canvas. His figures and symbols were uniquely Balinese and in themselves devotional offerings. Often his paintings were framed in broad teak boards that he carved, again with Balinese figures and symbols, which became integral elements of his composition.

  We spent almost an entire day with him. We liked a piece that he kept in his office. He was reluctant to sell us any of his pieces without his daughter, who was his business manager, but we prevailed and bought one that we knew would hang in the center of our apartment and be a constant reminder of our time in Bali.

  Slowly, I was incorporating art into my life. Collecting these pieces might help me integrate the changes in my life that I was now experiencing into the New York life I would soon need to return to. I wondered if I was already moving back into a more materialistic way of living, of buying art rather than creating it. I promised myself to keep working on my own art whether or not Victoria and I bought accomplished pieces that truly moved one or both of us.

  When we returned home to meet the kids as they arrived from school, we saw that Sam, who had not been feeling well, was becoming very ill. We had thought that his headache and cough was a mere cold, but now he developed a fever. Over the next few days, he became very lethargic, had trouble getting out of bed, and had no appetite. At times, he was so weak, he couldn’t sit up. Days passed, and he didn’t improve. We took him to the medical clinic in Ubud and then to one in Denpasar, but nobody knew what the matter was. We took him to Green School’s Dr. Ating, who thought it could be any number of things. Dr. Ating took some tests and a few days later emailed, “The results are difficult to interpret. Let’s hope it’s paratyphoid.”

  What we did know was that Sam was suffering and losing weight at an alarming rate, nearly 15 percent of his body weight in a little over one week. As the days wore on and he got sicker and sicker, Victoria and I grew very concerned. We were reaching our wits’ end with medical guesses and conflicting opinions. I told Sam, after about ten days of this illness, that if he didn’t recover within two days, I would take him to Singapore to seek more sophisticated medical attention.

  As Sam slept one day, Victoria and I took our motorbike into town to run some quick errands. Victoria sat on the saddle behind me, hugging my chest for stability the way she normally did when we rode together. She let her head rest on the back of my shoulders.

  Chickens screeched as we flew past. I yelled to be heard above the din of the engine. “I’m sick of the dogs and the chickens and the pollution. I’m tired of this third-world living. And I’m nervous about Sam. I’m ready to go home.” Something about Sam’s illness had caused me to see Bali in a different light. Like Junjugan’s migrating herons, an internal instinct told me that it was time to move on, and I surrendered to our timeline.

  When we returned to the villa, Sam was awake and said he was feeling a little better. We kept a close eye on his appetite and energy. Two days later, he turned a corner.

  twenty-one |

  I went to my final session at Pranoto’s. In the previous few weeks, I had tried to draw something every day. Pranoto’s studio was special to me, and drawing there had become a focal point of my experience in Bali. That day, I felt the weight of an ending.

  Just as they always had been, the first two hours were an exercise in frustration as I struggled to get into R-Mode. At one of the breaks, I said to a fellow artist, Pranoto’s daughter, who was visiting from Java, that I found drawing difficult. She took my hand and smiled. “It’s difficult for all of us. That’s why we do it.”

  It was more than difficulty that drew the artists to that room. Just as intention was important in yoga and meditation, it showed itself in art too. Without the artist’s intention, art was worthless. The art critic Arthur Danto asks what the difference is, for example, between an original painting, say by Jackson Pollock, and a perfect replica of it. Or, in the reverse, what is the difference between Andy Warhol’s replica of the Brillo boxes and the original boxes that were produced on an assembly line? Why is one worth millions of dollars while the identical item is worth next to nothing? They certainly look the same. One answer is intention. It is the artist’s intention in an original work that simply can’t be present in copies or frauds. The intention of the original boxes was commercial, but the intention of Warhol’s was high art. He took a familiar object, set it in a new context, and made it special. It was his intention to stimulate curiosity in the viewer—to show us an object stripped of our automatic presumptions about it—that made it art. Conversely, the intention behind fraud makes forgeries less than worthless.

  It is intention that stands at the doorstep of creation. It smells the freshness of the moment and brings to the world a new idea or perspective. As I continued to struggle with Seligman’s notion of meaning’s contribution to well-being, I recognized that without intention, there could be no meaning. Even if the main intention evident in a beginner’s work like mine was to create a convincing likeness of a person or scene, once the technique was mastered, deeper meaning could emerge.

  At Pranoto’s, I counted five languages being spoken among the fifteen or so artists who sat on cushions and gathered around the model in the center of the room. During the breaks, some artists pulled out musical instruments. I listened to guitar, ukulele, and flute while the model stretched to relieve her muscles. I took a meditative moment to absorb the scene, to notice the good in order to rewire neural pathways and cultivate joy. In an alternate life, this could be my world.

  Leo, the retired philosophy professor from Edinburgh, was at Pranoto’s that day. I talked to him about his technique and the direction he was taking his art.

  “I’m drawing only in ink now,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I like the sense of commitment.”

  I asked Leo how old he was. He blew my mind. “Eighty-six.” I thought of the work of Ellen Langer from Harvard University, the early pioneer in the field of mindfulness. Much of her work had focused on mindfulness as it related to aging and how it positively affected men and women as they grew into their senior years. Here in front of me was a man on his way to ninety years old, looking fantastic and still learning and experimenting. Now at eighty-six, he was finally ready to commit.

  The night before, Leo and I had attended a screening of the movie Happy at an expat community event. His example reminded me that the lessons from that film—that happiness is derived from pursuing intrinsic values, like love, gratitude, and courage, which connect us to one another—were first articulated thousands of years ago by Aristotle, who did not consider power, status, and money to be intrinsically valuable.

  At the end of the drawing session, when I said good-bye to Leo, he gave me a drawing he’d made of me. Apparently he’d lost interest in the model at one of our sessions and turned his attention my way. Because I’d been so lost in concentration, I had no idea he was drawing me. I was touched by the gift. It made me feel I’d joined some fellowship of artists. I was also startled by my huge nose. Gifting his own art was a wonderful act of gratitude and generosity, something to which I could aspire when my drawing skills improved beyond novice. For a moment, I noticed familiar self-criticism—was my nose really that elephantine?—until I surrendered to what was.

  After Leo left, I had a better look at the drawing. I loved being depicted as a true artist, drawing and yet at the same time meditating. I sighed. It was really me.

  Afterward, I met Victoria at the Yellow Flower Café, a favorite of ours. I arrived early. While I waited for her, a waitress saw my drawing pad. “Been drawing, yah?” she asked in a thick Balinese accent.

  I smiled. “Yes. Would you like to see?” I showed her what I was up to.
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  “Ah, bagus bagus,” she said. “Very good. Still learning, yah?”

  As we prepared to wind up our time in Bali, Sam was invited to an end-of-year party with some friends on a Friday night. By that time, his friendships at school had solidified. Well into his teenage years, Sam yearned to spend more time with his friends and less with his family. Victoria and I told him what he already knew, that he could not attend a party on Shabbat.

  He flew into a kind of rage I’d never seen before, stomping around, flinging his arms out, sputtering disjointed phrases. He was beside himself, not knowing what to do with his anger. He knew what Friday nights meant in our family, and the conflict was eating him up. He threatened to give up Shabbat as soon as he had gained his independence. Our other traditions, which he said he disdained, would suffer the same fate.

  What he said didn’t bother me, but it hurt to see him in such a state. I didn’t know what to do for him. I also took a step back from my insistence and patriarchal authority to wonder if my decision was right. Should our family tradition preempt Sam’s outward mobility, his urge or perhaps even his obligation to cross the boundaries he was brought up in and find his own way? Here was where Victoria and I often disagreed, less on the substance of the matter and more on degree. I tended on the side of self-exploration, she on the side of family and tradition.

  I decided to distract and calm him down. He loved our motorbike, and I invited him to come along on it while I ran an errand. Victoria was happy for me to take charge. On the way home, he let loose a tirade and lashed out at everyone: Victoria, his sisters, and me. He did not even exempt Oliver, with whom he bonded tightly. He was tired of being told what to do and how to behave and—directed at his school back home—what to think. He was dying for his independence. He was struggling to synergize the joy of an open, creative education in Bali with the more formal and religious education to which he was going to return.