Dusse
translated from the German by Florian Duijsens
Mindfulness
When you’re waiting outside a door, you’re waiting outside a door.
When you’re having an argument with your wife, you’re having an argument with your wife. That’s mindfulness.
When you’re waiting outside a door, and you’re spending that time having a mental argument with your wife—that’s not mindfulness. That’s just plain stupid.
J !schka B r()tn(r , Slowing Down in the Fast Lane: Mindfulness for Managers
First off, I’m not a violent man. Quite the opposite. For example, I’ve never once in my life gotten into a fight. And I didn’t even kill anyone until I was forty-two. Which, looking around my current professional environment, seems rather late—though, true, the week after that I did bump off almost half a dozen.
That doesn’t sound great, I know, but anything I did, I did with the best of intentions. A logical result of my commitment to becoming more mindful. To harmonize my work and my family life.
My first encounter with mindfulness was actually very stressful. My wife, Katharina, tried to force me to relax. To improve my resilience, my unreliability, my twisted values. To give our marriage one more chance.
She said she wanted that well-balanced man back she’d fallen in love with ten years earlier, that young man full of ideals and aspirations. Had I responded I would also like her to have the body back that I fell for ten years earlier, our marriage would’ve been over and done with. And rightly so. Obviously, time should be allowed to leave its marks on a woman’s body, but apparently not on a man’s soul. And
that’s why my wife’s body was spared a plastic surgeon whereas my soul was sent off to mindfulness training.
Back then, I thought mindfulness was just a different cup of the same esoteric tea that’s warmed over and repackaged under a new buzzword every decade or so. Mindfulness was just autogenic training without lying down. Yoga without contorting yourself. Meditation without sitting cross-legged. Or, as the article in Manager magazine my wife once demonstratively placed on the breakfast table put it: “Mindfulness means taking in each moment with love and without judgment.” A definition that made as little sense to me then as those pebbles on the beach pointlessly stacked by people so de-stressed they’ve become entirely detached from reality.
Would I have even participated in this mindfulness racket if it’d only been about the two of us, my wife and I? Not sure. But we have a little girl, Emily, and for her I would hitchhike from Sodom to Gomorrah if it meant our family would have a future.
She’s the real reason why, one Thursday night in January, I had my first appointment with a mindfulness coach. I was already twenty-five minutes late when I rang the bell outside the heavy wooden door of his “mindfulness studio” to discuss, among other matters, my time-management issues.
The coach rented the ground floor of a lavishly renovated old building in a fancier part of town. I’d spotted his flyer in the wellness area of a five-star hotel and seen his fees online. Someone who charges an arm and a leg to teach people to be more relaxed could probably meditate away any annoyance at a paying client’s lack of punctuality—at least, that’s what I thought. But when I rang the bell, nothing happened.
Until this relaxation guru refused to open the door, I’d actually been quite relaxed, because my delay was entirely excusable. I was a lawyer—criminal law—and had managed to squeeze in a remand hearing just before. An employee of my main client, Dragan Sergowicz, had found himself in a jewelry shop that afternoon wishing to pick out an engagement ring. Instead of money, however, he only had a loaded pistol on him. And when he didn’t like the rings that were presented to him, he smacked the jeweler in the temple with his gun. Since the jeweler had already triggered the silent alarm by then, the police arrived to find the jeweler on the ground, and the armed man offered no resistance when faced with the police’s two submachine guns. After they took him to the police station, they informed both me and the district judge.
If I’d retained the ideals I had as a law student, I’d have found it completely justified for such an utter lowlife to remain in pre-trial detention until the court hearing and then be tossed in the slammer for a few years.
With my years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer who specialized in utter lowlifes, however, I managed to free the idiot in under two hours.
So it wasn’t like I was running late to my coaching appointment; I’d basically been running a victory lap. And if this relaxation flake didn’t waste the remainder of our time being petulant, I could tell him why I’d been so victorious.
The man with a penchant for shopping while carrying was twenty-five and still lived with his parents. His criminal record didn’t have any violent offences, only drug-related ones. There was no danger of flight, repeat offence, or suppressing evidence. Plus, I’d argued, he shared the common social values of
marriage and family—after all, that’s why he’d been in the jewelry shop: By purloining an engagement ring, he was expressing his readiness to form a strong marital bond.
All right, for the jeweler in hospital and the cops on patrol, it must certainly have been difficult to understand that someone who was undoubtedly a violent offender was released to preen and mock the authorities to his friends that same night. When it came to things like this, even my wife occasionally found my work rather questionable. But explaining our legal system to other people wasn’t my job. My job was to exploit that system using every trick in the book. I made my money doing good for bad people. That’s it. And I’d mastered it perfectly. I was an excellent criminal defense lawyer, employed by one of the most prestigious corporate law firms in the city, ready and available around the clock.
It was stressful, of course it was. And not always compatible with my family responsibilities. That’s why I found myself at the door of this mindfulness guy, who wouldn’t let me in . . . My neck started to tense up.
But I got a lot in exchange for all that stress: a company car, bespoke suits, expensive watches. I’d never cared much about status symbols before, but once you’re a lawyer representing organized crime, status symbols start to matter. If only because, as a lawyer, you become a status symbol for your client.
So I got a large office, a designer desk, and five figures a month to bring home to my family: my delightful daughter, my wonderful wife, and me.
Sure—a high four-digit slice of that salary went to paying off our house. A home for my delightful daughter, whom I never saw because I was always working, and for her loving
mother, with whom, when I did see her, I only ever seemed to argue. Me because I was irritated by my work, which I couldn’t tell my wife about because she hated it; and her because she had to take care of our little girl alone all day—and had given up her own serious job as department head at an insurance company to do so. If our love was a delicate plant, we’d obviously been careless when we moved it up into a family-sized pot. In short, we were like so many successful young couples— going to shit.
In order to reconcile work and family, and because I was the only one of us who had both, my wife had decided I was the one of us who needed to work on themselves. She’d sent me to this mindfulness coach, a moron who wouldn’t open the door. My neck was really tensing up now, quietly crackling with every shake of my head.
I rang the doorbell next to the heavy wooden door for the second time. The lacquer seemed to be fresh, or at least that’s what it smelled like.
It finally opened, revealing a man standing there as though he’d been lurking the whole time, just waiting for that second ring. He was a few years older than me, in his early fifties.
“Our appointment was for eight o’clock,” he stated, then turned and walked down the bare hallway without another word.
I followed him into an indirectly lit, sparsely furnished office.
The man looked ascetic, not an ounce of fat on his sinewy body. The type of guy who essentially wouldn’t gain a pound even if you subcutaneously injected him with an entire cream cake. He looked well groomed, wearing stonewashed jeans, a
chunky wool cardigan over a plain white cotton shirt, and slippers on his otherwise bare feet. No watch. No bling.
The contrast couldn’t have been greater. I was wearing my dark-blue bespoke suit, white shirt with cufflinks, a silvery-blue tie with diamond-studded tie pin, Breitling watch, wedding ring, black socks, Budapest brogues. Even just my accessories outnumbered the furniture in his practice. Two armchairs, one table. A bookshelf and a side table for drinks.
“Yes, sorry. Got stuck in traffic.” After his non-greeting, I already had half a mind to turn around and leave. My wife could complain about me being late free of charge. But if Katharina found out that not only had I been late to my mindfulness course, but I’d also left in a tizzy, the resulting argument would cause enough stress to require two additional relaxation coaches. “I had a sudden remand hearing come up. Aggravated robbery, so I couldn’t just . . .” Why did I have to be the one talking? He was the host, shouldn’t he at least offer me a seat, or say something else? But the guy was just looking at me—almost like my daughter studying a beetle in the forest. Whereas beetles instinctively freeze when they find themselves observed by an unfamiliar species, I reflexively started to chatter.
“Maybe we can just speed things up . . . for the same fee,” I offered, trying to start afresh after our botched beginning.
“A road doesn’t get any shorter when you run,” was his response.
I’d read more meaningful slogans on my secretaries’ coffee mugs. And this one wasn’t even offset by a good cup of coffee. This did not bode well.
“Have a seat, won’t you? Can I offer you some tea?”
Finally. I sat down in one of the armchairs. It looked like it had once won a design award back in the antediluvian 1970s and essentially consisted of a single chrome tube, over which was suspended a coarse brown corduroy cushion— astoundingly comfortable, it turned out.
“Do you have espresso as well?”
“Green tea okay?” Ignoring my question, the coach was already pouring me a cup from a glass teapot. Its milky glass showed it had been in daily use for years. “There you go, room temp.”
I started, “Well, to be honest, I don’t know if this is the right place for me . . .” I clung tightly to my teacup, hoping he would interrupt me, but he didn’t. My words stammered to a sudden stop, met with the coach’s open expression.
After it became clear I wouldn’t finish my sentence, he took a first sip of his tea. “I’ve only known you for thirty minutes, but I think you could learn a lot about yourself here.”
“You haven’t known me for thirty minutes, though,” I remarked astutely. “I’ve only been here for three.”
Annoyingly placid, the coach replied: “You could have been here for thirty minutes. Obviously, you spent the first twentyfive or so minutes doing something completely different. Then you stood outside the door for three minutes wondering whether to ring the doorbell a second time. Correct?”
“Uh . . .”
“After you finally decided to ring again, the three minutes you’ve spent here so far have shown me that you do not consider the rare appointment focusing solely on you to be very important, that you exclusively let your priorities be set by
external circumstances, that you think you have to justify yourself to a complete stranger, that you cannot stand silence, that you cannot intuitively grasp any situation that deviates from the usual and that you are completely trapped by your habits. How does that make you feel?”
Wow, the dude was right.
I blurted out, “If those are also the exact same reasons you don’t want to have sex with me, then I’d feel right at home!”
Choking on his green tea, the coach started to cough and then burst into hearty laughter. Once he’d finished, he held out his hand. “Joschka Breitner, nice to have you here.”
“Björn Diemel, good to meet you.”
The ice was broken.
“So why are you here?” Breitner asked. I thought about it. I could think of a thousand reasons, and then not a single one. I felt I should probably display a certain degree of openness towards a mindfulness coach. After his burst of laughter, I also found him quite congenial. But I was far from ready to start sharing intimate details from my private life.
Breitner noticed my hesitation. “Just tell me five things that are related to you being here.”
I took a deep breath, then launched right in. “There aren’t enough hours in a day, I can’t switch off, I’m high strung, stressed out, my wife annoys me, I never see my daughter and I miss her. When I can spend time with her, my mind is always elsewhere. My wife does not appreciate my job, my job does not appreciate me—”
“You’ve lost count.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nine of these five things are classic symptoms of workrelated stress. Can you describe a few situations when you feel this way?”
I didn’t need long to remember when I had last felt overwhelmed, so I simply described my fraught experience just outside his door, taking him on my entire mental roller coaster ride.
He nodded. “As I said earlier, I think learning mindfulness techniques will prove helpful for you.”
“Great, let’s go!”
“Do you have any idea what mindfulness might mean?”
“I suppose I’m paying good money to find out over the next few hours.”
“When you were standing outside the door,” he said mildly, “you actually experienced it for free.”
“I must’ve been too distracted to notice.”
“That’s exactly the point: You stood outside the door for about three minutes, mulling over whether to ring again. For how many of those hundred and eighty seconds was your mind somewhere else?”
“To be honest, maybe a hundred and seventy-six?”
“Where did your mind go?”
“To a jewelry shop, to the police station, to my office, to my clients, to my daughter, to my arguments with my wife.”
“So in just three minutes your mind went to six different places, bringing up all the attendant emotions. Did that help you at all?”
“No, I . . .”
“So why did you do it?” he asked, with real interest.
“It’s just how it went.”
If a client of mine had said something like that in court, I would’ve forbidden him to speak altogether.
“Mindfulness simply and plainly ensures this will not happen to you.”
“Okay, but can you explain how exactly?”
“It’s really quite simple: When you’re waiting outside a door, you’re waiting outside a door. When you’re having an argument with your wife, you’re having an argument with your wife. If you prefer to use your time waiting outside my door to mentally argue with your wife, then you are not being mindful.”
“And how do you mindfully stand outside a door?”
“You just stand there and do nothing for three minutes. You note that you are standing there, and that your world will not veer into chaos if you are just standing there, quite the opposite. If you never judge the moment, you also cannot experience it as negative in any way. You simply perceive the natural state of things: your breathing, the smell of freshly lacquered wood, the wind in your hair, you inhabiting your body. And if you take yourself in with love, you will have rid yourself of all stress by the time three minutes are up.”
“I didn’t need to ring the bell a second time?”
“You never needed to ring the bell at all. Standing outside the door without any intention quite suffices.”
I had the sense I could do something with that basic principle. And funnily enough, I no longer noticed any tension in my neck. It was to be several weeks, however, before I realized that what Breitner revealed next would become the mantra for my first murder.
2 Freedom
Someone who always does whatever they want is not free. The idea of constantly having to do something is what holds us captive. Only someone who simply does not do what they do not want to is really free.
J !schka B r()tn(r , Slowing Down in the Fast Lane: Mindfulness for Managers
Breitner refilled our teacups.
“Most of our stress is due to a completely distorted idea of what freedom is.”
“Ah.”
“It is a misconception that freedom means being able to do whatever you want.”
“What’s so wrong with that?”
“It is based on the assumption that we always have to be doing something. That is the main cause of the stress you are experiencing. You are standing outside that door and consider it completely normal to be running through all manner of things in your mind. After all, ‘thoughts are free,’ ha! Yet the problem is exactly this: After those free thoughts gallop away from you, it is very hard to corral them again. But you do not have to be thinking at all. Quite the opposite: You can just not think if you do not want to. Only then are your thoughts truly free.”
“But I don’t just spend my days thinking,” I dared to object. “What causes me the most bother is what I do.”
“The same applies. Only once you internalize that you do not have to do what you do not want to do—only then are you truly free.”
I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do. I am free.
Less than four months later, I would seize this freedom uncompromisingly. I would seize it to not do something I didn’t want to do. Unfortunately, this would mean infringing on someone else’s freedom—taking their life. Yet I didn’t take this mindfulness course to save the world, I did it to save myself.
Mindfulness does not call for us to live and let live. It calls for us to live! And that imperative might affect the less mindful lives of others.
To this day, what still fills me with joy about my first murder is the fact that I was able to take in that moment with love and without judgment. Exactly the way my coach had counseled that very first session. My first murder was spontaneously born out of the moment, out of what I needed. From that perspective, it was a very successful exercise in mindfulness— for me, not for the other guy.
But when I was sitting in that armchair with Breitner and having my second cup of tea, no one was dead yet. I was only there to get a better handle on my professional stress.
“Tell me about your work. You’re a lawyer?” Breitner asked.
“Yes, criminal law.”
“So you make sure that every person in this country is ensured a fair trial, no matter what they are accused of. That must be very rewarding.”
“That’s exactly why I originally chose to do this—when I was in law school, during my apprenticeship, and also at the beginning of my career. Unfortunately, the reality of a successful criminal defense lawyer is completely different.”
“How so?”
“I mainly make sure that assholes don’t get into the legally appropriate amount of trouble. It might not be as morally worthwhile, but it’s extremely lucrative.”
I told him about starting at DED—the law firm of Von Dresen, Erkel, and Dannwitz—right after I was admitted to the bar. DED was a medium-sized law firm focusing on businesses, including any criminal elements. A pack of suits who presented themselves as legitimate yet did nothing all day but find new tax loopholes for filthy-rich clients and handle the cases of people who, despite our best efforts, got stuck with criminal proceedings for tax evasion, white-collar crimes, embezzlement or large-scale fraud. Any newcomer wanting to play in this league was expected to graduate with honors as well as complete several unpaid internships. And even out of the applicants who met these requirements, only one in ten was accepted. To get a job here immediately after the second state examination was considered hitting the jackpot in the job lottery. I got lucky—at least that’s what I thought at the time.
“You no longer see it that way?” Breitner asked.
“Well, over the years things have just turned out a bit differently than I expected when I was first hired.”
“That sounds like life. What happened?”
In broad strokes, I outlined my career, told him about the shocking starting salary and the shocking working conditions. Six and a half days a week, fourteen hours a day. Surrounded every minute by cold-blooded donkeys all chasing the same careerist carrot: to make partner.
I know what I’m talking about. I used to be one of them.
My first client was a guy who’d never been represented by
the firm before. The new client assigned to the new lawyer. That client was Dragan Sergowicz, but I didn’t use his name. I just told Breitner that the client was “shady.” Though the word “shady” was kind of an understatement when it came to Dragan’s lines of business. The red-light district in which he operated, for one, was flashier than a radar trap catching someone doing eighty in a thirty.
But Dragan’s business was financially successful, and he’d been vouched for by some of DED’s “legitimate” clients, who’d owed him a favor.
At our first meeting, Dragan said his case was about tax evasion. That wasn’t a complete lie, but it also didn’t match the prosecution service’s accusations. He had clobbered the tax administrator responsible for his case into the hospital after some follow-up questions Dragan considered too critical. After the administrator had recovered to the point where he could eat solid food and make an official statement, he oddly could no longer remember either any suspicion of tax evasion or Dragan’s visit. He claimed he’d simply had a bad fall.
In the years that followed, Dragan’s two fists were to prove even more effective than my two law degrees.
Dragan was not only a brutal pimp, but also a big drug and arms dealer. When I met him, he did a less than stellar job disguising his lines of work behind a number of semi-legal import–export companies. In short: Even for my employer’s very broad interpretation of legitimate business, Dragan was a so-called blah-client—one who poured a lot of money into the firm, but one you didn’t exactly want to show off.
Of course, this did not prevent the firm’s partners from
teaching me every financial trick in the book I could bill Dragan for.
Dragan became my first professional challenge. I put all my ambition into bringing his company portfolio up to date and thus keeping his activities under the prosecution service’s radar. Like before, his main sources of income were drugs, arms, and prostitution, but from then on, I channeled his money through plenty of forwarding companies, franchises, or cash-based businesses in which I had acquired a stake for Dragan. In addition, I showed him how to use EU-subsidy fraud to nab money out of non-existent eggplant farms in Bulgaria and how emissions trading allowed for sources of income that were at least as criminal as drug trafficking, but required no one’s bones to be broken—plus, both were state-subsidized. With my help, in just a few years, Dragan had transformed his public image from a brutal drug-dealing pimp to a halfway respectable businessman.
I perfected all the skills I had never learned during my studies: how to “influence” witnesses, “pacify” prosecutors, bring employees “in line.” In short, I got really good at convincing people.
“And you know why?” I asked Breitner.
“Enlighten me.”
“At first, because it was in my employment contract. I’m not a bad person, honestly. I really am rather anxious and boring, dutiful too—my sense of duty is perhaps my worst quality. And I’m fully aware that this system I helped set up is no good at all—neither for others nor for myself. Any system that rewards violence, injustice, and deceit, but not love, justice, and truth simply cannot be good. But I could still be good, at least
from inside the system. Out of duty, I’ve devoted years and years to making this system work. Yet I never noticed how it has slowly but surely changed me from a nerdy honors student into the perfect lawyer for organized crime.”
At some point, I just enjoyed mastering the craft. But perfection isn’t everything. Any half-decent lawyer can manage saving their client’s ass. At heart, nothing really changed. Even wearing the most expensive suit, Dragan never passed for a legitimate businessman. He was and remained a violent lunatic.
As part of lawyer–client privilege, I’d heard him spout more insane atrocities than Charles Manson might have to his confessor. At the same time, I had poured down legal bullshit all over his competitors and any possible witnesses of his crimes, so I really shouldn’t have been quite so surprised that I started to reek too. Well, I never noticed it myself; I had to be told by my odor-sensitive wife first. She was the one who finally realized I couldn’t keep this up.
