Quotes from Ellen J. Langer

Psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver found a correlation between optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery.15 Others have studied how attitudes affect recovery and found that this improvement is not a function of a patient's tendency to deny that he was ill.

It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits.

Wouldn't it be more advantageous to recognize that when placebos work we are the ones controlling our health, to learn how to exercise it directly, and to see ourselves as efficacious when we do?

in a society concerned primarily with process, the notion of deviance might have much less, if any, significance.

If we describe someone we dislike intensely, a single state-ment usually does it. But if, instead, we are forced to describe the person in great detail, eventually there will be some quality we appreciate.

An awareness of alternatives at the early stages of learning a skill gives a conditional quality to the learning, which, again, increases mindfulness.

From a mindful perspective, however, uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable.

Rarely will we be able to make it just as we thought it would be. But by struggling to do so, we often miss what it is—or could have been—if we had just left it alone, without trying to fix our mistakes, and went somewhere new and off plan.

When we are first learning to do anything, we ought to expect to make mistakes and we should see our mistakes as steps along the way to competence.

We tend to overemphasize how a negative outcome will affect us. In reality, people are much more resilient than they realize, and "bad outcomes" often are not nearly as bad as people thought they would be. In short, we can take more risks knowing that our "mistakes" (if that's even what they turn out to be) won't be as negative as we imagine they will be.

To not make a mistake we have to err on the side of caution and not try anything new. Such a life would be deadening, literally and figuratively. What's more, we limit ourselves if we play it too safe.

it's the fear that their creative endeavors won't live up to some external standard that keeps them from living a more creative life.

No matter how proficient we are at what we do, most of us are able to find a way to draw comparisons with some ideal or existing yardstick that keeps us from recognizing the value of what we are doing.

I am, instead, suggesting that we let rules and routines guide our behavior but question them as we find ourselves in new and different contexts.

William James claimed that almost all of us use only the tiniest fraction of our potential.11 Only under certain circumstances of constructive stress or in certain states—great love, for example, or religious ardor, or the courage of battle—do we begin to tap the depth and richness of our creative resources, or the tremendous reserves of life energy that lie sleeping within us.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. SUSAN SONTAG

The most common reason we hesitate when presented with the opportunity to express ourselves creatively is our fear of other people's negative opinions.

When we notice new things, we become mindful, and mindfulness begets more mindfulness. The more mindful we become, the more we see ourselves as white shirts and the easier it is to find the red spot and remove it. Attending

Mindfulness, as I've studied it for more than thirty years, is the simple process of actively drawing distinctions. It is finding something new in what we may think we already know. It doesn't matter what we notice—whether it is smart or silly.

Most tasks are not inherently pleasant or unpleasant, but an evaluation imposed on a task carries such a presumption. Virtually any activity can be made into work, and most, if not all, activities can be enjoyable.

Florida Scott-Maxwell, a Jungian analyst who did not begin her training until midlife, began writing a private notebook at the age of eighty-two, in which she recorded her impressions of old age. Her experiences, mindfully observed, did not fit her expectations: "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate.... To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction." I I

when the accomplishments of others seem attainable, they will inspire us; when they seem unattainable, they may be undermining.1

When we systematically attempt to narrow a choice, the perspective we most often neglect is our own experience.

Atul Gawande writes in his book Complications, it is instead "an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, [and] fallible individuals." Every individual is different, every pathogen is different, and therefore it should necessarily follow that every treatment strategy should be different. Yet, in modern medicine, this is rarely the case; Western medicine is embedded within institutionalized and standardized health care.