Stop. Look. Go.
By focusing on that for which we are grateful, by practicing gratitude every single day, by seeking out the beauty and positivity in every waking moment, we can create our very own . . . abundance.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
To be present to your life as it unfolds, to occupy each moment with a grateful heart, and to notice with curiosity what is happening inside and around you — all this delivers the possibility of contentment and joy. And all of it is facilitated by practice. It may seem odd that you would need to “practice” being available to life, but where we offer our attention, and how, shapes the ways we live our moments, and therefore how we experience our lives. Practice makes your moments more intentional and vivid. And it allows you to be more available to what matters most to you in life.
You will notice that simply making a commitment to grateful living as a practice in and of itself sends vital messages to your cells, your mind, your heart, and those around you. These messages help remind you to savor the life you have and be more available for its gifts. Committing to living gratefully helps reveal all the reasons you have to be thankful — waking you up to things you may have never noticed before and many you may have taken for granted. It opens your senses wider, focuses your awareness more intently, and orients you toward appreciation.
Recognizing that we are always practicing something, we develop the capacity to become more mindful of opportunities, and to shift our awareness toward that which awakens and serves us. When we practice, we guide our hearts and focus our minds to more readily access gratitude for the gift of life — so precious and worthy of our care and humble celebration.
Many of us need to cultivate reliable methods and practices to connect with or reinvigorate grateful awareness when it is not readily accessible. Cultivation harnesses the energy of our intentions. Just as we can cultivate a bountiful flower or vegetable garden, so too can we cultivate qualities in our lives we desire and that will serve our lives. What we nourish with our attention will nourish us in turn.
Grateful living weaves greater awareness throughout all of our moments. Like other forms of practice, grateful living offers a way to approach, frame, and learn from everything that unfolds in our lives, allowing us to access deeper reserves of resilience and wisdom. When you commit to practicing something, you become its student. You become attuned to its presence and promise. The good news is that the path of practice is deeply merciful; there is no doing it wrong. There is only the gentle reminder and opportunity to return again and again to your intentions, perhaps just one more time today, or simply one delicious moment more than yesterday.
Brother David Steindl-Rast lays out this simple yet rich prescription for how to practice grateful living: Stop. Look. Go. Most of us know this maxim by heart from when we were children standing at the curb with an adult next to us. It helps us harness our awareness, open all our senses, pay close attention, note the opportunities, and only then act purposefully. When we set out to meet the moments in our lives as if we were crossing a street, we cultivate attention, intention, and action: we stop, we look, and then we go. Following this rule preserved our lives as kids, and as adults it can help preserve our availability to live gratefully.
Stop. Look. Go. focuses us on cultivating three characteristics essential for a grateful life: presence, perspective, and possibility. When we stop, we become more present. When we look, we seek the gifts of a grateful perspective. When we go, we awaken possibility.
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What are some current practices you have or use in your life?
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What are some qualities you seek to cultivate, and what are some ways you do this?
Gratitude is an essential part of being present. When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously. — Eckhart Tolle
We can be sure of this: our moments are passing. This moment greets us as wholly alive now, then it goes, and we have no idea how many more moments are ahead of us. This singular truth shapes all of our lives and levels the playing field for everyone.
You choose how to engage with the moments you have — this is your opportunity for creation. Time is your medium. You are the artist. How you choose to spend your time says more about you than just about anything. It defines each of us. Our choices become who we are, the life we have, and, ultimately, the life that we lived — our legacy. But we can easily feel more like victims of our time than artists. In this day and age, our moments seem to pass more quickly with everything moving at an accelerated pace. Living gratefully reminds us that there may be no way to fully catch up, but we can always show up more fully.
We live in a culture where our attention is a sought-after commodity and the feeling of insatiability fuels our economic engines. It can be hard to feel that this moment and our individual life are enough. We can gravitate toward a fixation on to-do lists, goals, aspirations, entertainment, consumption of various kinds, and anything to fill and “busy” the moment at hand. When our “now” is disconcerting, we perseverate about the past and worry about the future. A simple spaciousness of presence can be disarming in its quiet grace and invitations. But learning to embrace the expanse of the present moment is the only true way to live a conscious life.
It is a sacred act to pause. And it has become a radical act to stop, or even to slow down. Becoming more present to the moment is an intervention in automation. It wakes us up and keeps us from going through the motions or sleepwalking through life. It introduces the opportunity for consideration and contemplation, and the possibility of recalibration.
One of the reasons we might avoid pausing to be more present is that it opens us to vulnerability and everything that comes with it — messy and magical, tumultuous and tender, serious and sacred. But meeting the moment with presence is the gateway to perspective and possibility. Simply being available to all of “what is so” in any given moment is what opens our eyes and hearts to life. This can allow for deeper feelings of belonging as well as isolation, longing as well as satiation. Presence ushers in awareness of the preciousness of life as well as the certainty of its ending. Ironically, it is only through strengthening our capacity to be with vulnerability that we will become more at ease with being present. And vice versa. This is one meaningful purpose of practice.
When we are fully in the moment, we will be frequently surprised and able to learn from life as it unfolds. How can we possibly take things for granted when we behold the ever-renewing ever-newness to life? Slowing down allows us to notice the nuances of our feelings and experiences, and this is what makes insight possible. And insight can shift everything in favor of greater ease and wisdom. The biggest challenge is that our most painful thoughts often hijack our attention and convince us that to step out of their fray would be useless or a betrayal. When in truth, learning to quiet an actively tumultuous mind in favor of the sanctity of the present moment is one of the most useful and powerful things we can do for our well-being.
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What is a recent situation that would have benefited from your ability to take a breather and pause to cultivate greater presence?
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What is a recent experience in which you recall noticing the benefits of being fully present? What distinguished this moment from the one you reflected on in the previous question?
The tiniest change in perspective can transform a life. — Oprah Winfrey
When Brother David invites us to Look — after stopping for presence and before going toward possibility — he is directing us to seek the opportunity for enjoyment that awakens our grateful hearts. We are invited to look for the surprises that would bring us delight. We are to notice the things we take for granted, now seen with freshly appreciative eyes. The beauty we missed while sleepwalking through the day. The opportunity to be grateful that is knocking just beyond our ability to hear it in the tumult that surrounds us.
In many moments, simply looking for beauty, surprise, and opportunity can be enough to deliver enjoyment — and with it a grateful outlook. You can direct your attention or ask yourself a question, and something you can feel grateful for will appear in your field of vision or awareness. These are times in your life to be cherished — the times when it is relatively easy to be grateful.
But there are many times in life when simply directing our gaze or attention is not enough to readily deliver gratitude. What is before us might not immediately speak to beauty, surprise, or opportunity — so we need to be able to see what is before us differently. One of the many gifts of perspective is that we can significantly change what we see by changing how we see. After a power outage, we shift from begrudging the clunky old lamp to celebrating the gift of its light. When we are truly hungry, we see the feast hiding in our vegetable drawer rather than just old produce. A loved one makes it home through a bad storm, and the morning’s disagreement melts away. Perspective helps us add context and consideration, allowing us to see what’s in front of us in a new way because it allows us to see with a wiser and more grateful heart.
You acquire perspective through experience and intention. It arises from what you choose to focus on, how you choose to see it, and the interior place from which you do the looking. We have influence over all of these. We can gain perspective by either moving closer or putting distance between ourselves and what we observe. It can allow us to be fully present to an experience and simultaneously be its witness. Perspective can let us put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, a future moment in time, or the vantage point of a bird’s eye view.
There are encounters that broaden our perspective and those that constrict it, attitudes that open up greater awareness and those that batten down our hatches, questions we ask ourselves that expand our consideration and those that limit it. Certain people and settings open us to perspective; others shut us down. The good news is that perspective enhancement is a practice that can be learned. Our work is to continually reset the aperture on our lens, inviting the focus and frame of reference that best allow gratefulness to surface and serve us.
We have all gained or lost perspective in the blink of an eye. We both consciously and unconsciously need to seek and re-seek it, sometimes hundreds of times a day. With grateful living, we can redirect our attention with prompts, short practices, questions, and reminders. We do not have to physically go somewhere for perspective (although travel is an exceptionally effective and enjoyable way to come by it). We can use memory or imagination to access other ways of seeing a situation. We can purposefully shift our thinking in ways that enhance our understanding of life.
Perspective is simply another way of experiencing the truth of what is. It is not an “attitude adjustment,” because what we are experiencing isn’t wrong. Instead, we gently layer on awareness, redirecting our attention to concurrent truths. Perspective helps us to remember that beauty and heartache coexist, as do grief and gratitude, joy and sadness. The dividends of perspective are reaped long term, arriving when our gratefulness accounts are near empty. Insight and wisdom come unexpectedly, but we need to sow their seeds all the time. We honor the longing to feel more grateful by honoring the wisdom of what is true. Learning to cultivate a more grateful perspective can make all the difference in how we experience most anything, and most everything.
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What activities or reminders help expand your perspective when it feels small, or help you find perspective when it feels lost?
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When your perspective feels enhanced, how do you experience your life and act differently?
As you begin to Look, there are Five Points of Perspective that will help you practice grateful living: embrace poignancy, invite peak awareness, acknowledge privilege and plenty, align with your principles, open to pleasure.
These points of perspective help you see things in new ways. Each one opens the aperture slightly differently, letting more light and information flood into what you can observe and sense is possible. In your daily life, you routinely enhance and shift your perspective, mostly without being aware. We are constantly making shifts in our attention so as to be more resilient and effective. It is valuable to become aware of the ways that perspective supports us to live gratefully, as it is of such profound benefit to our individual and relational lives.
As the last butterscotch sunbeams of summer light pass across the grass, you stand in awe, wanting to capture the radiance and hold it inside you.
Saying goodbye to someone you love dearly, you allow yourself to feel the weight of affection, vulnerability, and longing in your heart as you hold your hug longer than usual.
The nuanced meaning of poignancy has been lost in our common vernacular. When someone says something is poignant, we might think they are implying it is overly sad. But poignancy is actually a state of being deeply touched. It naturally accompanies our awareness of the limitation of time in the midst of meaningful experience. Poignancy heightens our senses and unleashes some of our most powerful emotions. It allows joy and grief to coexist harmoniously. You are holding a perspective of poignancy when:
Poignancy aligns perfectly with the first grateful living principle: Life Is a Gift. This principle helps you remember that when you greet each moment gratefully, you are always receiving. Poignancy is a rich and provocative invitation to embrace paradox: we know poignancy whenever we hold love in the same space as we hold awareness of impermanence. Poignancy cracks our hearts open and makes us want to treasure what is available for us to love now.
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Aware that life is beautiful and fragile, I am awakened to what matters.
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I greet each passing moment as precious.
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How would embracing poignancy offer you a more grateful perspective?
Surrounded by people — known or unknown — you feel suddenly overwhelmed and moved by the shared vulnerability of being human. You stand transfixed in awe at our common ground.
Standing at the edge of a body of water or mountaintop, the vastness of the world cracks you open to the oneness of all life and you sense your true belonging.
Peak experiences are those that engulf all our senses and leave us feeling more connected than ever to ourselves and our shared humanity. These experiences can also deliver us into awe and a larger landscape for hope. Peak awareness refers to the insights gleaned from our moments of peak experience. You are holding a peak awareness perspective when:
Peak awareness is closely aligned with the second grateful living principle: Everything Is Surprise. This perspective helps you remember that when you open to wonder, opportunities will abound. It reminds us of the grandeur and mysteries of time and space and that we are not in charge of everything. Peak awareness is often awakened by an experience of solitude in nature or in the midst of the hum of humanity, and it leaves us with an expanded vantage point. Like poignancy, peak awareness also holds paradox: in seeing life from 10,000 feet or with a view of the long arc of history, we feel our smallness. Peak awareness reframes our experience by reminding us that the eye of the beholder makes a difference — as does our vantage point.
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An expansive vantage point allows me to open to wonder.
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Seeing the big picture, I remember my inherent belonging.
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How do the insights of peak awareness offer you a more grateful perspective?
Everything that works about your body, your mind, and your life, and all the ways in which you are not struggling suddenly strikes you as a great gift and you feel blessed.
The feeling of being safe and comfortable in your home, reaching for what you need and finding it there, awakens a sense of deep thankfulness.
Making a practice of regularly acknowledging all that is sufficient and plentiful in our lives allows us to access an experience of privilege, meaning an awareness of our relative good fortune. You are holding a perspective of plenty and privilege when:
Recognizing the plenty in our lives connects us to the third grateful living principle: The Ordinary Is Extraordinary. This helps you see that when you take nothing for granted, life is truly abundant. Affirming how we are not suffering or lacking in what we need and how much is accessible to us helps us recognize the blessing of having ease in many areas — ease to which not everyone has access. Privilege is a matter of perspective and encourages us to feel grateful and responsible. Ultimately, it will serve us to recognize the ways in which our lives are laced with plenty, and not only to know it but also to name it. To claim it. To share it. Because no matter who we are, we are surrounded and filled by things that make our lives extraordinary. Overlooking and denying what we have is to diminish our blessings and to disrespect their sources. Acknowledging the ways in which we are rich wakes us up to our windfalls, allows us to thrive, and helps our gifts flow to the benefit of the larger world.
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I notice all the ways that my life is working right now.
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My life is abundant in endless ways.
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How does acknowledging your privileges and plenty offer you a grateful perspective?
You connect with your innermost wellspring of values and beliefs and know without effort exactly what you stand for, and you stand taller inside.
Your sources of inner and outer guidance come into exquisite alignment, and you feel held and directed toward trusting yourself and life.
Our principles are present in the values and beliefs that orient us to life, offering guidance when we are seeking direction and reinforcement for our choices. Our overarching principles come from various sources in life, and the exact constellation is uniquely ours. You are holding a principles-informed perspective when:
This perspective relates to the fourth grateful living principle: Appreciation Is Generative, and helps you remember that when you tend those things you value, what you value thrives. When we align with our principles, we align with the energy of our spiritual core. Possibility opens up — and we do, too. Our principles act like a spine keeping us upright in our actions, helping us to stand and to take a stand. When living gratefully, our principles allow us to access both internal and external wisdom from a place of being grounded in our beliefs.
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My integrity always offers trustworthy guidance.
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I am gratefully aligned with my values and beliefs.
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How does living in alignment with your principles support a more grateful perspective?
Your senses are saturated by the beauty of a moment, and in order to soak in every bit of wonder and meaning so as to preserve it, you raise your arms to the sky.
You are so fully engulfed in gratitude for the enjoyment of an experience that you lose track of time and allow pleasure to fill you.
When we allow our senses to engage fully with life, we are available for the unexpected opportunities that arrive on the heels of wonder. We are alert for enjoyment. You can recognize a perspective of pleasure when:
A perspective of pleasure connects us to the fifth grateful living principle: Love Is Transformative. This principle can help remind you that when you embrace the great fullness of life, your heart will overflow. We use our senses, savoring delights and tuning us in to creativity and the things that we loved when we were young. We are open to the presence of joy and the joy of presence. This vantage point supports us to behold people as if for the first or the last time, with reverence. A grateful perspective makes its home in all the possibility of love, and wants to be freely shared with others.
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I come alive when my senses celebrate beauty with abandon.
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Surrendering to love, I am connected with life.
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How can opening to pleasure offer you a more grateful perspective?
This is not a time of mere change. This is a time of transformation, and transformation comes not out of scarcity but out of the context of possibility. — Lynne Twist
The final step in the Stop. Look. Go. practice is vital and differentiates grateful living practice from many other awareness practices. Doing something with the appreciation and opportunities that come our way brings the cultivation of presence and perspective into the service of our lives and life itself. This is how possibility comes to be. Grateful action is what puts the life into grateful living.
Living gratefully, we do not simply settle our bones when we can look around and pay homage to what we have in our lives that inspires our gratitude. Counting our blessings is a wonderful start, but the intention is to have the awareness of our blessings inspire us to live more wholeheartedly. The grateful heart wants to be expressed and shared; it wants to be lived. It recognizes our interconnectedness as its shared home and wants to benefit others. Once blessed with presence and perspective, gratefulness wants to cast its ripple, have its impact. Go beckons us to actively step into our lives and into the world, to finally engage with the possibilities waiting on the other side of the busy street.
Action that emanates from the grounding nature of presence and the guiding nature of perspective is necessary in difficult times. It is what will bring healing to the places that have been injured by misguided action. Acting from gratefulness when we feel moved is critical. Without presence and perspective, we often make messes — either in what is done or left undone, said or left unsaid. As the poet David Whyte says, “Regret is . . . an elegy to lost possibilities.” Regrets stain our memories and make our hearts ache for what was misunderstood, unexpressed, or unfulfilled. To heal our regrets takes courage and an overflowing of the heart toward possibility. Preventing future regrets requires the same. With grateful living, we have the chance to wake up and devote ourselves to new possibilities, live from the fullness of our hearts, and suffer fewer regrets.
When opportunities knock, they rarely knock just once. They keep on arriving, and they all point us to possibility. Only when we are available to life can we hear and heed how we are called. Envisioning and investing in new possibilities is how transformation comes about. But how do we step into all the possibility that exists in a moment? We harness our big hearts and go forward with purposeful intention. We say “Yes!” to life.
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What motivates you to participate in shaping new possibility?
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How is possibility beckoning you — even quietly — right now?
The transformative practice of Stop. Look. Go. will enrich your life. There is no aspect or moment of life that will not be served by becoming more awake and aware through presence. Presence allows you to be alert to the fullness of your life with greater wonder and opens you to perspective. Perspective expands your experience of life, allowing for greater appreciation of the opportunities available to you, and opens you to possibility. Possibility enlivens the moment at hand and animates your imagination and energy for what can be.
Grateful living is experienced and expressed in how you live the life you have. This life. Here and now. In the midst of any moment, if you simply pause to more fully notice and savor it before carrying on, this is grateful living in practice. This is Stop. Look. Go. as an everyday epiphany.
We live gratefully whenever we are awake, aware, alert, appreciative, and alive to our experience. Life delivers us opportunities in every moment: drinking tea, driving, making a meal, engaging in a conversation, going on a walk, sitting at your desk, taking care of someone, or brushing your teeth. There are as many ways to live gratefully as there are moments in the day. It can be elegantly simple. Begin wherever you are. Brother David says, “It is enough to be grateful for the next breath.” Whenever you wonder how you might access gratefulness in a given moment, try this: Simply return to awareness of your breath — inhale and exhale gratefully. Recognize the fact of your aliveness. Tune in to your body as it breathes for you. Feel appreciation for the moment. Invite your heart to soften into gratitude for the opportunity that life is offering you in this moment. Notice the ways that this is enough.
The practice of introducing simple moments and experiences of gratefulness into your day is profound. When you remind yourself of this practice throughout the day and string these moments together, you discover that these subtle internal shifts impact your sense of well-being. The commitment to living gratefully itself will yield tangible gifts and guide you, over time, to greater joy and peace. Trust this. And keep returning to your grateful intentions.
You can use the Five Guiding Principles as meaningful entry points whenever you need them. Say each of the principles aloud or to yourself, and become aware of their impact on you. Notice if you are drawn more to any one principle or part of one principle, and work with it as an intention, a mantra, or a daily reminder. Or use all five principles as a map to deepen your journey from one point of grateful awareness to another. You can also use the Five Points of Perspective in whatever ways work for you. Each point of perspective is accompanied by affirmations that can help guide you toward a grateful orientation. Explore their resonance and relevance in a variety of settings and circumstances.
Try bringing the guiding principles, points of perspective, affirmations, questions for reflection, and meditations from this book into your day in creative ways:
Life lays out a banquet of opportunities for you to engage in living gratefully. All the ingredients of grateful living are available to you, and each day is yours to make a bountiful feast. No matter what you do to remind yourself to take nothing for granted, how you arrive at openness for surprise, where you turn to notice beauty, or whom you choose to appreciate more fully — you are living gratefully.
Give yourself a grateful day that offers points of connection and practice: