St. Paul tells us, “In all things be grateful.”
Meister Eckhart famously said, “If the only prayer you ever say is ‘thank you’, that will be sufficient.”
And this from the menu board at the Amish market near us: “What would you have today i fall you ha was what you were grateful for yesterday?”
I especially like the second, "What would you have today if all you had was what you were grateful for yesterday?”
I'd say you would be rich indeed. A passage from Emerson seems to fit:
It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness meat-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold.
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine, -- "It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it."
Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.