Gratefulness will be that full response which releases the full power of my compassion. Gratefulness is creative and overflows into action.

Br. David Steindl-Rast

Welcome to Day Three of Stop.Look.Go

Perhaps the greatest gift of living gratefully is its capacity not only to shape your individual life but to create a positive ripple effect through your actions. As you awaken more fully to the gifts and opportunities of your singular life, it becomes less likely you’ll take any of it for granted. And that’s when the grateful life asks something of you: to make your individual contribution to life around you. 

You might be wondering, isn’t it enough to focus on feeling grateful for the good things in life? For a blue sky or needed rain, for a friend or kind neighbor, for our very breath? The answer isn’t simple. Appreciating life’s gifts is certainly foundational to living gratefully; it’s the value and practice on which a grateful life hinges. But it’s not the whole story. Without action, gratefulness is a beautiful bud that never comes to full bloom, an hallelujah never sung out loud.

In other words, gratefulness increases our awareness of life’s gifts and the opportunity in each moment of our lives, but it doesn’t end with an inner sense of compassion and care. It is completed through action. To live gratefully includes embodying our appreciation in our interpersonal relationships, as well as in ways that advance a more peaceful, equitable, and ecologically healthy world. Br. David reminds us that we cannot be fully awake to life “if we sleep through our responsibility to the public good.” To take grateful action, with purpose and courage, is the third step of Stop.Look.Go.

Today’s Practice: Respond to Life

Set the stage for today’s practice by reading Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris, in which the poet suggests that our outward expressions of care and generosity may be “the true dwelling of the holy.”

Small Kindnesses

by Danusha Laméris 

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Once you’ve read through the poem a time or two, you’re ready to begin today’s practice.

Step One: Identify

Identify one thing in the world for which you’re deeply grateful and that is calling for your attention, care, or work — anything from a personal relationship in your life to a social justice issue, a community garden to quality schools, a forgotten friend to a big principle like love or belonging. You may have a long list, but start with just one.

Step Two: List

Take a few moments to list all the ways you appreciate and value this particular person, thing, or idea. Consider how your life and the lives of those you love are made better — possible, even — because of the existence and care of this particular thing, person, or idea.

Step Three: Act

From this place of awareness and appreciation, come up with one action you can take right now to nourish and sustain what you care about. Begin where you feel called, whether your action is interpersonal or more public, and don’t let perfection get in the way. The idea is to build a bridge between what you cherish in your heart and how you express it in the world.

Here are a few ideas to help you respond to life with grateful action:

  • Light Up Your Small Interactions: Be on the lookout for the “brief moments of exchange” that Danusha Laméris describes in her poem above. Create what she calls “holy, fleeting temples” by expressing your gratitude, care, or appreciation in otherwise ordinary exchanges throughout your day.
  • Take Time to Appreciate Someone: Tell one person in your life how much they mean to you, especially if you sometimes take that person for granted. Be specific about what you appreciate. The recipient can be someone close to you or perhaps your healthcare provider, your neighborhood postal worker, a clerk at your grocery store. 
  • Act on Behalf of What You Value: Support a local project to protect something you cherish by donating, signing up to volunteer, or sharing their newsletter with others. Call or write your representative to ask them to stand up for an issue, principle, or public service whose future matters to you. If you’re grateful for things like schools, clean water, libraries, and other public benefits, take action on their behalf.

Step Four: Reflect

After you’ve put your gratefulness into action, take some time to consider the following questions:

  • When you become more attuned to what you value and cherish in life, how does expressing that appreciation through action change you?
  • This practice asked you to focus on one thing as a way to get started. Now that you’ve done that, what else is calling for your outward expression of gratefulness and care?
  • In what ways does this third step of Stop.Look.Go move beyond a feeling of gratitude to something tangible?

Scroll to the bottom of the page (or click here) to find the Community Conversation space where we invite you to share your reflections about today’s practice.

Deepening Resource

In Truly Wealthy, a 6-minute film by Reflections of Life, the artist Obert Jongwe tells the story of how he looked for and discovered opportunity — the opportunity to help others, to go — during the global Covid-19 pandemic. He shares, “We always look for resources to help others. But do we realize that we are the best equipment in this world? And we can do so many wonderful things even without money.”

Truly Wealthy by Reflections of Life

Research Highlight

Gratitude Makes You More Charitable

One of the most exciting research findings is that practicing gratitude actually changes the neural pathways in our brains. Using MRI studies, Dr. Christina Karns and her team at the University of Oregon discovered that gratitude changes the neural pathways of the brain in ways that increase our enjoyment of giving to others. When we practice being grateful in our lives, we actually become more charitable toward others. Their research supports the order of Stop.Look.Go, in that our presence, perspective, and enhanced appreciation enable us to more readily act on behalf of the greater good.


Pathways