I was raised in a household where all three of us boys were taught: to serve others is to live a good life. Lucky for me, I have had numerous opportunities to get paid to serve others - in the glorious world of food service. Service work is where you really find yourself in the trenches. Here is where I have found myself taking care of people in their moments of relaxation, helping them enjoy a nice fish-and-chips dinner, dialing up some steamed milk for a cappuccino, or cooking them up a black bean burrito.

Waiting tables in the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Helping manage multiple cafes. Working as a line cook. Being a member of a catering crew a few dozen deep. These jobs require you to be part of a team. To ride the daily wave: the calm set-up, the intense rush, and the decrescendo clean-up. You are part of a system with many working parts. And each restaurant or café is unique, but over time, just like with people, you begin to see the universals, what is similar across café to restaurant to catering gig. You begin to see the culture of each workplace, how it works smoothly and where it falls apart.

In these service jobs, you have the opportunity to engage with and to observe people all day long. All types of people, and often an endless flow of people, thousands every week. I am not sure how many people I have served over the years – tens of thousands I imagine – and each day there are a handful of interesting conversations. Each day I observe small social groups: how couples relate, how parents treat their kids, how individuals interact with the café. From this vantage, one can observe nascent social trends, e.g. the use of computers as babysitting devices.

The other major benefit of my service jobs is that I use them as a venue to introduce people to my studies and my writing. No matter what the social setting, I have been telling people about my Urbanmonks projects for the past dozen years or so and this conversation functions as an invitation for people to open up. And what I have found is that people want to talk, people are hungry to reflect with others, people have solutions to brainstorm. And this is the idea for the Urbanmonks Thinktank, that we only know so much on our own, but if we can collect our little drops of wisdom, we can learn how to grow healthy: grow healthy individuals, grow healthy families, and grow healthy communities.

The grass is always greener on the other side; that which we lack is exalted and that what we have is often taken for granted. As I am writing these words in a dense urban environment, the grass is much greener, over that fence, in the fields and in the greenhouses. Nature-based jobs, though physically taxing, seem like a grand retreat compared to the over-stimulation of New York City. While working with plants one is literally hands deep in soil, the culture in which plants grow. Here there are parallels to teaching, for the end goal is to help healthy growth. But in the fields it is less about growing healthy humans and more about growing healthy garlic bulbs, raising strong bee hives, trimming trees to allow for optimal fruit production. It is grounding being on farms, where there is an intimacy with nature, with creation, where there are many hours spent learning how soil and plants thrive.

Working in greenhouses, raising tens of thousands of newborn tomato and pepper plants from seed, is akin to teaching, to mentoring, but so much less chaotic, so wonderfully quiet. Probably too quiet for most, but once you become acclimated to the rhythms, one finds a calming camaraderie with the birds that pass by each day. Afternoon breezes are a daily event. How will tonight’s sunset be? When will the next rain come through? The weather is the ultimate authority, dictating when certain activities occur. There is a peace in the time spent with soil, trees, plants, animals, and insects.

Beekeeping is something I wish everyone could do at some point in their lives, because beehives are their own little communities with different bees having different roles. The hive is a social system and there are distinct relationships between various parts of the hive. There are worker bees that never fly far from the hive and then there are the foraging bees that fly off for up to three miles in any direction, engaging in the entire ecosystem. The foraging bees fly any day above fifty degrees to pursue nectar, the sweet sugar of flowers that has evolved to attract pollinators. They also gather pollen, the protein and vitamin-rich male seeds of the plants. Beekeeping encourages one to think like the bees, to observe the weather and to always be on the lookout: is the clover blooming yet? How has the rain been during this flow of locust nectar? Are there any bees in that cluster of wildflowers?

Then once a week you take the goods to market. I would work the stand for my beekeeping mentor, Duane. He taught me how to serve the bees and then serve the people who love to buy honey. On any given Saturday, I would sell hundreds of pounds of honey, beeswax candles and bee pollen, all the while answering questions about how bees work. At the market stand, all three of my spheres of work came together – agriculture, education and food service.