In countless articles and interviews as well as in more than a dozen books, Ellen J. Langer offers an abundance of invaluable insights.

Here are the ones of greatest interest and value to me, presented as a mosaic of wisdom.

None is a headsnapper but note the accumulative impact they have as you proceed through them.

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“Stress is a function not of events, but of our view of those events…Life consists only of moments, nothing more than that. So if you make the moment matter, it all matters…There is always a step small enough from where we are to get us to where we want to be. If we take that small step, there’s always another we can take, and eventually a goal thought to be too far to reach becomes achievable…Virtually all of life’s ills boil down to mindlessness… If you can understand someone else’s perspective, then there’s no reason to be angry at them, envy them, steal from them…In the perspective of every person lies a lens through which we may better understand ourselves…We should open ourselves to the impossible and embrace a psychology of possibility…Out of the questions of students come most of the creative ideas and discoveries…What we have learned to look for in a situation determines mostly what we see…People are at their most mindful when they are at play. If we find ways of enjoying our work blurring the lines between work and play the gains will be greater…When people are not in the moment, they’re not there to know that they’re not there…Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded… views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness…Once you’ve seen there is another perspective, you can never not see that there’s another point of view…Certainty is a cruel mindset. It hardens our minds against possibility…Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow…To be mindfully engaged is the most natural, creative state we can be in…Mindfulness is the cure for everything; the essence of being alive…If we respect students’ abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come some of the most creative ideas and discoveries…No worry before its time…Knowing what is and knowing what can be are not the same thing…The rules you were given were the rules that worked for the person who created them.”

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I highly recommend Langer’s classic, Mindfulness, 25th anniversary edition (A Merloyd Lawrence Book), published by De Capo and available in a paperbound edition.