Ecclesiastes 5:19 · World English Bible
Every man also to whom God has given riches and wealth, and has given him power to eat of it, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor—this is the gift of God.
Wealth and the capacity to enjoy it are two different things, and the second is far rarer. A man can own a mountain of gold and eat his bread without tasting it, because his mind is already at tomorrow's accounts while his mouth is busy.
From the Indian Guru reading below.
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
AWARENESS
Wealth and the capacity to enjoy it are two different things, and the second is far rarer. A man can own a mountain of gold and eat his bread without tasting it, because his mind is already at tomorrow's accounts while his mouth is busy.
Enjoyment is a quality of awareness, never a property of the thing owned. Where attention is total, an ordinary meal becomes rich; where it is absent, nothing is enough. Renouncing possessions changes nothing here, since the miser and the ascetic are equally obsessed with the same objects. The gift is the ability to be present, and it comes when the mind stops running ahead.
SELF-HELP
Wealth and the ability to enjoy wealth are two separate gifts, and only the second one ever pays out.
A portion can be completely owned and never once collected. Collecting is its own capacity, and expectation is what shuts it down: once the portion registers as owed, its arrival produces no emotion, and with no emotion in the receiving there is none in the labor either, and joyless labor is the kind a person either abandons or resents for decades.
Appreciation puts feeling back into holdings that never changed size, which is why rejoicing in one's own work comes as a gift from God rather than as an output of wealth. A person who never receives that second gift can spend thirty years building an estate they never once live inside.
Indian Guru lens
What did you have today that was already enough, and did you taste it?
When you eat, just eat. When you walk, just walk. The whole teaching is that most of us are never doing the one thing we are actually doing.
Knowing you have enough is itself the wealth. Someone who cannot feel enough will not feel it with more, because the lack is in the looking, not in the amount.
It is not the person with little who is poor, but the person who always wants more. He kept the plain meal and the plain cloak partly to find out whether he could still taste them.
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Indian Guru
Self-Help