"A merry heart does good like a medicine."

After a lengthy late shift at the hospital, I was waiting for my Uber ride back home. As I stepped out into the warm Tennessee air, I noticed a black sedan pull up to the emergency entrance. The driver, an elderly African American woman with a warm and welcoming smile, greeted me with a twinkle in her eye.

"Hello there, honey," she said, her voice filled with a deep, comforting South American drawl. "You've got yourself a mighty fine smile. It's good to see a smiling face."

I couldn't help but return the compliment, telling her how her cheerful presence was exactly what I needed after a tough time in the hospital.

As she was looking at the GPS for navigation, I asked her, “How was your day?”

“I have been humming this beautiful song all my day. I must be happy.”

I wanted to ask what she was happy about. Her looks as well as her reference to happiness and song reminded me of what Maya Angelou once said – A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. I refrained from asking that silly question and instead asked her to sing that song for me.

She started humming a gentle tune: "A merry heart does good like a medicine." I queried about the song. She said she learned it in the church. It was a line from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament of the Bible. It suggests that having a joyful and positive attitude can have a healing or therapeutic effect on one's well-being, similar to the way medicine can promote physical healing.

To keep the conversation rolling, I told that there is a beautiful poem in The Psalms in the Bible which I really loved and it was about “Lord is my shepherd”. The number I forgot. She told me it was Psalm 23.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”



Apart from being a revered religious text. It can mean different things to different people at different points in their lives. From a literary view also the Bible is deplete with poetry, allegory and parables.

I read the Bible when I was in high school in Pokhara. A Christian friend of mine gave it to me. It was his copy and had those colorful highlights and underlines so it was easy for me to go through it selectively.

It was the Psalms 23 in the Old Testament and The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament which he had underlined and highlighted and I loved them too. And those where the pages I photocopied at the price of 1 rupee per page before I returned the book to him. Those photocopies I myself underlined and highlighted several times and still have it in my box back home in Nepal.

I had my own personal context at the time I read it. I was a 16-year-old "love-sick school boy" who had an unreciprocated crush in school and was withdrawn and introverted, often lost in his perpetually melancholic or pensive thoughts. The overwhelming feelings of unrequited love and rejection had led me to sadness and depression. I had bouts of deep sorrow, often triggered by seeing the object of my affection indifferent to me.

I found Psalms dear to me because I subconsciously linked the Shepherd to the nebulous beloved whom I created out of the sinews of my loneliness. It was the time and hormone bound time bomb that ticks in everybody’s teen age, the bitter sixteen, pun intended!

The Sermon on the mounts was dear to me because it told you will be blessed despite being poor and meek and hungry and lonely. Especially when you have no strength to be somebody or do something and still cannot accept to be nothing.

Okay, I could settle with the ideal of continuing to be nice and dreaming of a beloved who would come some day and take me to the green pastures by the side pristine waters of the stream, anoint my hair and give me love and light but there was a deep existential debate and angst in me. The angst that was to be answered by Nietzsche and Sartre.

Nietzsche proclaimed that the God is dead and Sartre said that life had no meaning in itself. Sartre also said the other is hell. Buddha had been saying expectation from the world gives you pain. At the end of a long discussion, my friend had asked me what did I like the most in the Bible. I said, Jesus himself crying in despair at his crucification “Oh Lord in Heaven, Why have you forsaken me”.

Most of the times, if not at all times, I think books do not help you to be reflective. Book reading is the search for your reflection. The words that mirror your thoughts become dear to you. It helps to propagate your own thoughts even further. It doesn’t break you free from the thoughts.

Brooding is different from being reflective. Reflection and meditation brings peace, solace and complacency. Brooding is prolonging of the misery. We do not need answers. We need songs.