20 Quotes by Ellen J. Langer

By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.

Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.

Out of time we cut “days” and “nights,” “summers” and “winters.” We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. – William James, “The World We Live In.

If we examine what is behind our desires, we can usually get what we want without compromising: love, caring, confidence, respectability, excitement. Compromising is necessary only if what we want is in short supply.

In combating prejudice, then, the issue is not simply how we might teach the majority to be less judgmental, but also how we might all learn to value a “disabled” or “deviant” person’s more creative perceptions.

Instead I invite you to consider why you laughed at a joke the last time you did. If the punch line made you realize that the story could be understood in a way other than how you first heard it, you have experienced a moment of mindfulness.

Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent. Dr.

Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.

We simply don’t know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not “the truth.