Today's excerpt is one of the most important in the entire book. Now we are getting to the establishment of a ritual, a simple daily ritual of reflection. Let me know what you think.

A Good Life, a Good Day

Now that you understand my approach to wisdom, let us explore the specific skill that this book focuses on: building a simple daily ritual of self-reflection.

The ancient philosophers often debated about this notion of ‘a good life.’ What is a good life, and, how does one build a good life? This remains an essential starting point. But I would like to offer a correlated point. I offer one improvement to this approach: that as we try and think about building a good life, we concurrently think about building a good day and a good week.

I have found that the first step to building a good life, a life that you are proud of, is to start small. We must begin our pursuit of a good life by building a ritual of stepping back and reflecting, a ritual of daily retreat. It is important to have this long-range vision of a good life, but our life is lived day-by-day and the day is a manageable portion which we can focus on, understand, and improve.

A ritual of daily reflection is the greatest thing missing in most of our lives. And this is missing for many reasons. First and foremost, many of our old rituals for reflection have been displaced by a modern culture that does not emphasize retreat and reflection. Secondly, retreat is often intimidating. It can seem scary to truly listen to and observe ourselves. But one must trust the process; one must trust that this is essential work.

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.