The year 2014 was not a good one for Bill Rea, a musician and teacher on the Outer Banks.

First he lost his day job as a banker. “It happens,” he says with a shrug. “Banks get sold; people get let go.” Still, it wasn’t easy. He received other job offers but decided to take some time off.

On a trip to the grocery store one afternoon, he impulsively grabbed a carton of fried chicken. He ate it all—and felt worse than he’d ever felt in his life.

“Hey mister, what’s your story?”

I was sitting in traffic at an interminable stoplight. Around me were upscale stores, the kind where I feel a little guilty shopping, and people driving nice cars. This made it all the more difficult to ignore the sunburned man who was crouching at the intersection with a sign: “Homeless and Harmless. Please. Anything Will Help.”

It was the “Harmless” that got to me. I rolled down my window and called to him.

He was a nice looking man in his late 20s. As he came over, I expected him to tell me a sob story. But not at all.

Six years ago, during a time when my life had completely lost its luster, I met a clerk at a Wawa convenience store who understood the healing power of happiness. Actually, I suppose I never really “met” him.  I simply had the good fortune to go through his checkout line.

I have a friend who’s in trouble. Let’s say her name is Vicki. Let’s say she’s in California. The details don’t matter. Hers is an all-too-common story. A mutual friend, Lucy, has kept me up to date on Vicki’s situation with her husband, who abuses her.

Lucy is Vicki’s confidante, the person who’s heard the most about the psychological intimidation Vicki suffers. Recently Vicki has started saying she’s going to leave him. But they have two children, and she doesn’t want them to grow up without a dad. Also, she feels bad for her husband. He had a rough childhood, with a rich father who didn’t love him.

One beautiful spring day several years ago, I traveled deep into the mountains of Chiapas with a group of conservationists to talk with local ranchers about cows—specifically, what they ate, and how. Around us the steep hillsides were nearly denuded. What grass remained was gray-brown. So many cattle trails crisscrossed the area that the hills looked as if they had been terraced by an ancient culture. It was among the most abused land Jeff and I had ever seen.

And yet in a small valley just below, some of the biggest cows we’d ever seen grazed on long, lush grasses. Suisse was the local term the ranchers used to describe them: well fed and healthy in all respects.