DC 2013 deux

More pix from the 2013 trip to DC, and some excerpts from Ms. Tippet's interview with Ellen Langer, a social psychologist who some have dubbed "the mother of mindfulness." The interview was originally broadcast in 2014, so apologies if this is a repeat. "she defines mindfulness with counterintuitive simplicity: the simple act of actively noticing things - with a result of increased health, competence, and happiness. "

"[M]indfulness, for me, is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. When you actively notice new things that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context. As you’re noticing new things, it’s engaging. And it turns out, after a lot of research, that we find that it’s literally, not just figuratively, enlivening. . . .[S]o, you’re going to home tonight and if you live with somebody, notice five new things about that person. It’s very — it can be very specific. And what will happen is the person will start to come alive for you again. And, that facilitates the relationship."

"the mind/body unity theory. . . So what we do is we say let’s treat the mind and body as one. If we do that, we put this thing in a context, both the mind and the body are in that same context. So the first test of this was this, uh, study with, um, elderly men, where we’re going to put their mind in an earlier time. That was the . . . retreat study where I took old men to a timeless retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier, . . . and had them live there as if it was the present, speaking in the present tense, and so on . . . And . . . as a result of . . . living in that environment in this retreat we had set up for a week, their hearing improved, their vision improved, uh, their memory improved, their strength improved. At the end of this, uh, they were evaluated by people who knew nothing about the study as looking significantly younger than comparison years."

"[M]any years ago, I talked about the difference between can and how can. It seems so similar, but they’re vastly different. When you ask yourself how do you do something, you’re bypassing your ego in some sense. You’re just out there examining, fiddling with things trying to find the solution. If you ask yourself can you do it, then all you can appeal to is the past, and, um, so with lots of things — when people say, um, you know, people can only do A, B, or C, the first thought in my mind is always, well, how do we know that? How could that be?"

The whole interview is here, and the transcript here.

OK, now the pix:

Exterior of the Hirschhorn

The Smithsonian castle

See below

Inside the Peacock Room (sorry, it was dark)

Ditto