Pip: Nature as medicine, optimism as brain food, and art as the engine of democracy — Happy Soul Food Friday! is out here writing the prescription the rest of the internet forgot to fill.
Mara: Soul Food Friday covers a lot of ground this week — from the neuroscience of optimism and the world’s oldest doctor’s rules for living well, to the civic case for arts funding and what creativity actually looks like in practice. Let’s start with the wellness territory.
Nature, Optimism, and the Rules for Living Well
Mara: The thread running through this week’s wellness posts is deceptively simple: the things that keep us healthy — nature, optimism, purpose — are rarely what conventional medicine trains doctors to prescribe.
Pip: And on the nature side, the post leads with a WBUR story about Dr. Susan Abookire, who is trying to change exactly that. The post frames her work this way: “Doctors spend years becoming experts in how the body works, how it can break down and how to recognize and treat various illnesses. Their training rarely involves what’s known as nature-based medicine.”
Mara: So the upshot is that a whole dimension of preventive care is simply missing from medical education, and one doctor in Boston has made closing that gap her mission.
Pip: The optimism piece adds a striking data point — a Harvard study finding that optimism may lower dementia risk by fifteen percent. And the world’s oldest doctor, Howard Tucker, who practiced until 103, kept it even simpler: his three rules for a long, happy life are, by his own description, very simple.
Mara: Which is maybe the most useful thing any of these posts says — that the evidence keeps pointing back to the unglamorous basics. That hands us right to the bigger civic question: what happens when we defund the structures that support those basics?
Art Is the Engine, Not the Ornament
Pip: The civic arts post opens with a provocation — that budget decisions reveal not just fiscal priorities but values, imagination, and responsibility to future generations. The frame here is San Diego, but the argument is universal.
Mara: The post draws the historical line directly: “For centuries, societies have understood that arts, culture, and the humanities are not decorative luxuries but foundational civic infrastructure.” Ancient Greeks, Aztec empires, Renaissance cities — the post argues that every era of civic flourishing invested heavily in creative life.
Pip: And the consequence is concrete: San Diego’s arts organizations serve more than a million residents annually, providing after-school programs, mental health support, and economic activity. Defunding them isn’t a budget trim — it’s removing infrastructure.
Mara: The post pairs that civic argument with a piece on individual creativity — a researcher who spent forty years studying highly creative people and identified four phrases that stifle creative thinking cold. The implication is that creativity isn’t a talent reserved for artists; it’s a habit anyone can protect or accidentally kill.
Pip: There’s also an 18-year-old named Ayra Satheesh who just won the European Earth Prize for an invention tackling microplastics. Which is what imagination actually looks like when it isn’t being talked out of itself by the wrong four phrases.
Mara: The Einstein epigraph the post opens with earns its place by the end: logic gets you from A to B, but imagination — and the civic structures that nurture it — takes you somewhere worth going.
Pip: Nature, optimism, art, a 103-year-old doctor, and a teenage inventor — not a bad week for the soul.
Mara: The through-line is that the things we tend to treat as extras — green space, cultural funding, creative habits — keep showing up in the evidence as essentials. Something to carry into next week.
Happy Soul Food Friday! 