Dr. Ellen Langer

My mother died when she was a young woman.

I'd been divorced, and so none of those things sound so big anymore, but nevertheless.

In the moment, it's like.

Yeah.

And when those things happen...

I don't think that my response is, oh, well, you know, I'm of this earth.

Sure, sure.

But it doesn't stay with me.

So let's say, and I wrote about this in The Mindful Body when the house went up in smoke, that I called the insurance adjuster.

He came over the next day, and he said it was the first time in his 25 years of the job where the call was less bad than the damage.

Most people go, oh, my God, oh, my God.

And he gets there, and it's not so terrible.

One little room, yeah, yeah.

But to my mind, it was already gone.

What was the point in getting crazy over it?

And I immediately felt that what had been burnt were things of my past.

So if I were to redo it today, that day, how many of those things would I have bought again or what have you?

But it was still a little scary.

But I might as well tell the whole story now because this turned out to be wonderful.

Really?