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.
“The only way to save yourself from the darkness is to light a candle for someone else!”
What you may not know when you read on is Billy is what my school friends in India called me (short for Billimoria) before we moved to the States. My Parsi name (Parsis are the Zoroastrians of India that migrated from Persia hundreds of years ago) is Navroz, and I was born just 9 days after Navroz or Nowruz. That said,
Nowuz is timed not to a fixed date, but to an astronomical event…
Enjoy a little bit about each of these events and traditions, along with a soulful story to follow that should lift your spirits!
BTW, if you are local-
Friday March 20th is the last day to nominate your volunteer for NCPC VAC.
Please consider nominating an amazing volunteer that invests their time and talent to make our community better and see you on April 10th at the Rancho Bernardo Inn from 2 to 5:30 with our live band Strange Crew playing after the ceremony!
The Spring Equinox is on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 7:46 am PDT This moment begins the spring season in the Northern Hemisphere. Translated literally, equinox means “equal night”. On the equinox, the length of day and night is nearly equal in all parts of the world. Twelve hours of each, because the sun is positioned above the equator. It is also known as the vernal equinox, “vernal” means fresh or new, and is from the Latin word for spring, which is “ver.” On this day the sun rises precisely due east and sets due west.
The Spring Equinox signifies a rebirth. The duration of light is about to overtake the darkness. After the Spring Equinox, the days become longer and the air warmer. The soil becomes fertile and all hibernating life is re-animated. It is a time to plant seeds of growth.
The Spring Equinox is a time of renewal – in nature, the home, and in us. More than just physical activity, “spring cleaning” removes any negative energy accumulated over the dark winter months and resonates with the positive growing energy of spring and summer.
The Spring Equinox is a time where there is a special quality of energy – to plant, grow and renew our lives. Energy is emerging from the ground where it has been dormant in the earth since the Winter Solstice. Wishing you a special day, symbolic of balance in our life and with the environment.
Stay in tune with nature and wellness, Billy
Nowruz 2026: Persian New Year Dates and Meanings:
300 million people around the world celebrate this tradition.
And finally, the heartwarming soul-filled story I promised to warm your heart and stir your soul:
The entire line was furious at my 89-year-old father for stalling the bank queue—until he made the teller weep.
The groan from the guy behind us was audible. It was a heavy, “it’s Friday afternoon and I just want my paycheck” kind of groan.
My dad, Frank, didn’t seem to hear it. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
He stood at the counter of the credit union, leaning heavily on his cane, while the line snaked all the way back to the vestibule. People were checking their watches. A woman in scrubs was tapping her foot so hard I could feel the vibration through the floor.
I was mortified. “Dad,” I whispered, leaning in. “Please. Let’s just use the ATM next time.”
He ignored me. He was focused entirely on the young woman behind the glass. Her name tag said “JASMINE.” She looked like she had been crying on her break. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she moved with the heavy, robotic exhaustion of someone working a double shift.
“I need to withdraw $100,” Dad said, his voice gravelly but loud. “And I need it all in five-dollar bills.”
Jasmine blinked, her customer-service smile faltering. “All in fives, sir?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I felt the collective blood pressure of the room spike. The guy behind me muttered something about “wasting everyone’s time.”
Jasmine sighed, opened her drawer, and counted out twenty bills. She slid the stack under the glass. “Here you go, sir.”
“Thank you,” Dad said.
And then, he started counting them back to her.
One. By. One.
“Dad!” I hissed. “Come on!”
“One moment,” he said calmly. “Five… ten… fifteen…”
He counted all the way to one hundred. The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on. When he finished, he paused. His hand, shaking slightly with a tremor he usually tries to hide, slid two of the bills back toward her.
“This one,” he said, tapping the first Lincoln, “is for you. Go to that coffee place next door when you get off. Get one of those frozen drinks with the whipped cream. The ones that cost too much.”
Jasmine froze.
“And this one,” he tapped the second bill, “is for the security guard by the door. He’s been standing there for four hours and hasn’t shifted his weight once. That takes discipline.”
“Sir, I can’t take a tip,” Jasmine stammered.
“It’s not a tip,” Dad said, looking her dead in the eye. “It’s a prescription. You look like the weight of the world is sitting on your shoulders, young lady. For five minutes, I want you to put it down and just eat the whipped cream.”
That’s when she broke.
It wasn’t a graceful single tear. Her face crumpled. She covered her mouth with her hand, her shoulders shaking, and let out a sob that silenced the entire lobby.
The angry guy behind me stopped checking his watch. The woman in scrubs stopped tapping her foot. The room went dead silent.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I… I really needed that today.”
Dad just tipped his VFW cap at her. “We all do, kid.”
When we got back to my minivan, I didn’t start the engine right away. I looked at him. He was staring out the window at the strip mall parking lot, looking smaller than usual.
“You held up the whole bank,” I said softly. “Just to give away ten bucks.”
He didn’t look at me. “It was selfish.”
I laughed. “Selfish? Dad, you made that girl cry happy tears. That’s the opposite of selfish.”
He turned to me then, and his eyes were wet.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I sit in that house all day. I turn on the TV, and it’s just people screaming. They scream about politics. They scream about the economy. They tell me my neighbor is my enemy. They tell me I should be scared to leave my front door.”
He gripped the door handle with his spotted, papery hands.
“I feel invisible,” he whispered. “I’m just an old man that the world has moved past. I can’t fix the economy. I can’t stop the wars on the news. I can’t even drive myself to the store anymore.”
He took a shaky breath.
“So, I act selfish. I force a moment of connection. I buy a coffee for a sad girl because for those thirty seconds, I’m not just a statistic. I’m not just a burden. I’m a human being affecting another human being. I made the world stop spinning for a minute, and I made it a little bit softer.”
He looked down at his lap. “I do it because it makes me feel less lonely. It proves I’m still here.”
I drove home in silence, tears stinging my own eyes.
When we pulled into his driveway, I grabbed the bags of groceries from the back. “I got you that frozen lasagna you like,” I said.
“Good,” he said, taking the box. He immediately turned and started walking across the lawn toward the neighbor’s house.
“Dad? Where are you going?”
“To the Millers’,” he called back. “Mike lost his job at the plant last week. I saw him sitting on his porch steps with his head in his hands this morning. They have three growing boys to feed.”
“Dad, that’s my dinner for you!”
He stopped and looked back, a mischievous glint returning to his eye. “I know. But giving it to them makes me feel like a provider again. It makes me feel useful.”
He winked. “Like I said. I’m a very selfish man.”
I watched him walk away, his cane tapping against the pavement.
We live in a world that is constantly trying to isolate us. It tells us to fear each other, to hoard what we have, to look out for Number One.
But my father taught me something today.
Sometimes, the only way to save yourself from the darkness is to light a candle for someone else. Even if it costs you your dinner. Even if it costs you ten dollars and a few angry glares in a bank line.
If that’s being selfish, I think we could all afford to be a little more selfish.
Please light a candle for someone else this week and enjoy these events of astronomical proportion!
Simple acts of kindness can make a big difference especially in times of uncertainty.
Don’t forget to be kind to yourself too!
5 Benefits of Kindness
Elevation of dopamine levels in the brain, which makes us feel good.
The feeling of emotional warmth, which leads to a healthier heart.
Reduction in inflammation, which can slow the aging process.
Reduction of emotional distance, which helps couples feel more bonded.
Contagiousness that often sets off a pay-it-forward ripple effect.
WORLD KINDNESS WEEK
Spread kindness all week-long during World Kindness Week. Each year during the week of November 13, stay positive, spread joy, and make the extra effort to be kind to everyone.
“I’ll Never Forget That Kindness”: 34 Of The Nicest Things Strangers Have Done That They Still Remember Today “That simple moment stuck with me. I genuinely believe she saved my life.”
Gig Alert for Friday November 7th 6-9pm Drivin the Bus @ Aquarius Bar and Grille, Quivira Way, San Diego
If you want to connect with community, convive with kindred spirits, consume some live music, and fall into fall then see you Friday evening at Aquarius.
14 Signs Your Dog Loves You: How Do Dogs Show You Love? Canines thrive on human companionship and love, so chances are, your pup would hold your hand if he could. Here, nine signs your pup loves you and is super connected.
Inspiration from the 20th Annual Nonprofit Governance Symposium at USD:
Last week I had the privilege and opportunity to help shape and participate in the 20th Annual Nonprofit Governance Symposium at USD.
The In the Spirit of Leadership session in the afternoon, included a 10-minute nonstop writing exercise, along with a mindfulness practice, and some affirmations.
While I love writing and word play, this was new territory for me, and the writing exercise unleashed another creative dimension of my inner self, that came out unedited, in one flow experience, with pen to paper for the duration, until we were told to stop and come back inside.
Thanks to Causmosis, Dr. G and Dr. Y for an amazing conference and unleashing a different aspect of my authentic self!
Here goes:
Causmosis Made Me Do It
Top of mind, this is an experiment in open cognitive/emotional expression,
Where I go, I do not know- just flow baby flow.
Towards the abyss, I cannot miss,
The arrow hits the target the eye cannot see,
The guru within comes out in me,
I am emerging, growing, nearly free,
Free to be fully me!
I stand in the hallowed halls of grace,
I cradle my young self by the face,
Mistakes are forgiven trace by trace,
The irony, the tyranny are dissolved in the synchrony…
Reaching out on bended knee,
Bruises do not tattoos be,
I am not blind, I surely see,
Into thee I see.
Into thee I see.
Is this my very first spoken word?
Birthed of creativity in the theater of the absurd,
Expressed from sorrow to be heard,
Why did I wait to flip the bird- to doubt, to fear, to lack of faith?
Affirmations simply cannot wait!
It’s time to walk, how straight the gait,
I’m living freely for heaven’s sake!
In symphony with those around,
I hear birds sing in the background,
I feel my feet right on the ground,
My spirit soars its heaven bound.
Causmosis sits to my left,
She wields her pen with deft and depth,
Inspiring artists want to know,
What performance plays in the “inside” show?
And so, I write and write and write,
My grip is failing- pressure tight,
Is this from gripping this little pen,
Or fear of failing littler men?
Who can say?
What do I know?
It’s time to end,
This delightful show.
WORD!
Great Things Are Happening EVERY Day, but you don’t Hear About Them:
These stories don’t bleed, and so they don’t lead but here is some positive news to offset all the bad stuff that saturates our media, day in and day out.
Happy Soul Food Friday! 