Portrait of a Peacemaker: David Steindl-Rast

Austrian born, David Steindl-Rast emigrated to America in the 1950’s with his family. Shortly after arriving, Brother David joined the Mount Saviour Monastery, part of the Benedictine community. He balances hermitic life with life on the road, giving lectures to an expansive and diverse community of people.

In June of 2013, Brother David expanded his lecture audience from physical to virtual when he appeared in a TedTalk featuring his work on gratefulness. In his talk, Brother David answers a question that touches people everywhere: Want to be happy? Be grateful. We’re not so different than we imagine. There are beautiful things that make us different from each other, but we all have one thing that connects us, explains Brother David, which is our longing for happiness. We imagine our happiness differently, of course, but the commonality between each of us is the desire for happiness itself.

Brother David presents this question with such simplicity and ease. The answer, he says, is not complex, and doesn’t require much more than intentionality and concentration. It’s as easy as crossing the street, Stop. Look. Go. A seemingly simple equation for an elusive state of being . Brother David goes on to say, “That’s all, but how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don’t stop. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives.”

First, we stop and open our eyes, ears and all of our senses to all of the goodness of the world, and we enjoy it. And then, Brother David continues, we must open our hearts for the opportunities to help others, to make others happy, because happiness is magnified when shared with others. Finally, “we go and we do whatever life offers in that present moment. Mostly it’s the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it’s something more difficult.”

The magnitude of gratefulness is enough to surpass our own happiness and slowly foster happiness within the world: “A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people—the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we’ll have a joyful world. People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place.”

Stop. Look. Go. What have you seen today?