"Look here. You are not supposed to set the breakfast before 06:15. It says so here." She pointed to small print next to the hundred-year-old pulley lift that moved the food between floors. I had been doing it from 6am for several days, and due to the gender segregation rules in the kitchen, this was not even her section to manage. Despite over a week of more than three hours of daily meditation, the box-ticker in her had found its jurisdiction.
"It's strange that others think so differently from me, isn't it?" I said.
"Yes. And it has nothing to do with your skin color."
We were nine volunteers who had come together to give students of vipassana meditation ten days of board, lodging and meals, completely free, from 05:30 in the morning until 9 at night. Authorized teachers handled the instruction. We handled much else. Except for one other person with a background similar to mine, we came from completely different walks of life. What we shared was the practice itself, and the desire to offer others what it had given us.
On the very first day I met a long-term server who had spent several months there. He knew the kitchen and its protocols the way only time teaches you. When he reprimanded me for something that was none of his business, I told him plainly that the person concerned should come to me directly, and he should stick to his role. That evening I wondered aloud to my colleagues whether the tone he had used with me had something to do with my skin color. What I did not fully reckon with then was that after that first day, despite my continued attempts, the server never spoke to me again. This, despite every evening of explicitly meditating over errors committed and forgiveness. A week later, at the pulley lift, a colleague answered a question I had not asked.
Nobody volunteers for sixteen-hour days of gruelling kitchen work without a compelling reason to be there. With three and a half hours of meditation spread through the day, the moral compass is present and the awareness is real. And yet, within a few days, autopilot sets in. The ego finds its surface. The rules become the purpose rather than the means to it. Operating procedures exist for good reason and they make necessary tradeoffs that individual judgment alone cannot. If I allow one meditator to eat well past closing time because it feels kind in that moment, I delay the cleaning, shorten the breaks for every server, and leave the cafeteria closed longer, meaning others cannot even help themselves to water or tea. The rule I bent for one quietly punished many.
My first vipassana service taught me the value of tough blue-collar work, a truck-load of rules and a gruelling schedule. But more than that, it exposed human nature at close range. I greatly value my business education for helping me understand how capital and labor interact, the value of diversity and business as a force for good. Yet purpose is more compelling than money. I also learned how selfless service quietly transforms into pride, how being busy is easier than true service, and how being polite is sometimes easier than doing the right thing. Even when capital is taken out of the picture, our sankaras, our unconscious autopilots, do not appear in any balance sheet. Karma cannot be written off as a sunk cost, nor can purpose be seen as a perfect antidote to capital. So when one puts people ahead of profit, the biases and limits of human teams still need to be acknowledged. They will always impact performance, with or without money on the table.