Your Soul Food for Friday September 5, 2025: Kindness Heals Us All!

Happy Soul Food Friday!

This week:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.

It is my personal approach that creates the climate.

It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.

I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Alteration:

Though you’ve tried

to fit into

a thousand

small boxes,

perhaps comes

the day when

you’re opened

by grief or by

love, and your

thoughts unstitch

from what you knew,

and your mind

begins to rhyme

with sky, becomes

spacious enough

whole flocks

of bluebirds

can fly right

through, and

for a time you

stop trying

to make sense

of things, you

simply yield

to being

a home for

the ecstasy

of wings.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Harvard expert shares his 1 tip for living a happier, more successful life
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Harvard expert Arthur Brooks: Top tip for happier, more successful life

Queen’s Classic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ finds a new voice in Zulu
It’s one of the most famous rock songs ever — Bohemian Rhapsody — and now, for the first time, it’s been translated with Queen’s blessing into Zulu.

Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ gets its first translation — into Zulu : NPR