A Number of Things

Robert Louis Stevenson said it, and I think it's true: “The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
Known for his children's poetry as well as his adventure stories, Stevenson's cheerful couplet suggests that it's the number of things that should make us happy.
For Stevenson, that might have seemed more true than it does to us now. He lived in a time when a number of things weren't available to many people, and life wasn't as comfortable as we experience it to be.
We have many many things, and what some of us have learned is that it really isn't all about the things at all. It's about the relationships, it's about the giving, it's about the loving and caring.
Maybe that revelation is the best thing we can say about the wealth of things around us -- the comfort and convenience is nice, but the truth that things aren't everything is even better.