Looking back on my meandering path of employment, common themes do emerge. My jobs all reside within three main fields: teaching, agriculture, and food service. These three fields seem very different, but I now see that they are united in a common element. They are all connected to the process of growth and nurture: raising healthy plants and animals, raising healthy children and adults, and nurturing the most basic of human daily retreats, shared meals.

The word teach comes from an Old English root word that meant to "show, declare, warn, persuade." Over the years, as I have taught, I have indeed shown, but as any teacher will tell you, I have been shown so much. Each day is a learning experience for the teacher, as they gauge how and when the teaching worked and how and when the teaching failed.

My teaching began by working with mentally-handicapped adults while I was in high school. In graduate school I was able to help teach a number of courses in the field of City Planning. My favorite teaching gig – to the most appreciative students – came next: teaching math and facilitating a poetry workshop at Auburn Maximum Security Prison. My most recent teaching opportunity was teaching World Religions to high school students in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Throughout all these teaching jobs, the aspect that resonated most with me was the opportunity to mentor. And this is not solely the guide for my role as teacher, but this is how I approach my role as writer. When I mentor, I feed kindling to already burning fires. I aim to help fires grow stronger and more effectively. The mentor has the essential task of guiding, of encouraging, of providing feedback, of keeping it real through the sharing of one’s own battle stories. My first book, Prayers and Knives and other Meditations on the Search for Mentors, was my first attempt to pay complete respect to the life-changing role of a good mentor.

The benefit of all these various teaching environments was the intimacy established between teacher and student, between mentor and mentee. The role of the teacher is to help the healthy growth of this human being. And the opportunity to help us grow healthy minds and spirits in these various sub-cultures – Ivy League college classrooms, inner city schools, tough prisons – is enlightening because I am able to see what we all share in common. It allowed me great insight into how we grow and learn, and what limits our abilities to grow and learn.

In founding the Urbanmonks Thinktank, I have tried to create a location where ideas can be gathered and shared on the process of adjusting our approach to emotional health. Generally we do not focus on a proactive approach, but rather we react and try and fix problems after they arise. This approach works reasonably well, but when we are facing the situation where millions are dealing with the common emotional maladies of anxiety and depression, when we have twice as many suicides as murders in America, it is time to think proactively: how do we make us more resilient? How do we grow wiser children, teens, adults and elders?

The second aspect that the Urbanmonks Thinktank proposes is a system-based approach. We currently try and fix the individual. Yet, we are all products of our environments. It is my observation that many of those struggling with anxiety and depression are not inherently damaged people, but they are normal humans placed in cultures (systems), both large and small, that foster anxiety and depression.

So my method is born out of this goal: to investigate the relationship between our minds and the settings, both the physical settings and the social systems, we have built. I have come to refer to this study as Emotional Topography. Topography meaning the detailed mapping or charting of an area. In this case, we are building emotional maps.

By culture I am referring to the many layers of culture. There is indeed a culture of our relationships, of our households, of our workplaces, our villages and neighborhoods. Culture means the social setting: the relationships between characters and the rules, official and implied that govern the social system. Culture also includes the physical settings: the general ambiance, the lighting, the colors and the textures of a place.

Too often we think too large when we think about social systems, when we think about culture. American Culture. Modern Culture. These are enormous. Trying to change the trajectory of these levels of culture is an overwhelming task. It is more empowering and more possible to change our local systems, our local cultures.

The key method for my study is anthropological in nature: to spend time in dozens of different settings and to compare the various experiences. I have lived in large cities, small cities, and rural towns. I have worked many short-term jobs, from seasonal positions to year-long teaching gigs. My jobs have paid the bills, as jobs do, but I have sought out jobs where I was going to learn a whole new set of skills and be exposed to a new sub-culture.

Take the past three years in New York City as an example. I taught in a diverse inner-city high school in Brooklyn. Then I honed my design and carpentry skills by building a street cart to sell books in Union Square Park. As I write these words, I am managing a café in Soho part-time. Three very different worlds, three different sets of relationships and responsibilities. Three very different landscapes when we consider them from the lens of emotional topography, yet all three are nestled within the broader American culture and New York City culture.

All of the years since I studied Urban Design in graduate school have been similarly variable. But this is how I have performed my independent research, with new skills and new relationships in different settings. The theory was that if I could know enough workplaces, enough sub-cultures, enough systems, enough relationships, I would have a good sense of how this human mind worked - how it thrived and how it crumbled – in relation to various settings. The theory was that if I worked alongside hundreds of people and was able to interact with thousands of folk in various settings, I would begin to better understand what was unique about individuals, but also, and more importantly for our study, what was common to us all.