The Happiness We’re Searching For
Once, I visited a place in Rajasthan, along with the late Maulana Muhammad Taqi Amini (d. 1991). There, we met a man who lived on a farmhouse. He had inherited considerable wealth from his father. He had married a woman of his choice, and the two of them lived on the farm.
On the face of it, the farmhouse seemed a lovely place. But inside, the man and his wife were a picture of utter misery. The couple had married out of choice and began a happy married life together on the farm. But after some years, they got bored of this sort of life. Maulana Amini and I spent a night and a day in the farmhouse, and during our stay I did not see them talk with each other even once. The farmhouse that was once a nest of joy had turned into a graveyard of gloom!
In my long life I have seen many people like this. They had worked very hard to amass wealth, but after that, they discovered that their wealth couldn’t give them the joy they were seeking.
It often happens that a person gets married, very excitedly and with many hopes and dreams, to someone of his choice. But just a few days into their marriage he feels that his marriage is only a dry responsibility for him, a big burden! Someone else spends a major portion of his life in politics, hoping to climb up the ladder of political power, but when he gets to where he wanted to, he finds that he is utterly miserable! Somebody works for years to make money so as to build a beautiful house for himself and his family. But after staying in the house for a while he finds that he still isn’t happy!
For many people, life seems to be full of such tragedies. Writers in different languages have written hundreds of thousands of novels about this. These novels are a representation of a very general phenomenon across cultures and communities. Strangely, in hardly any language has a comedy become a bestseller. Most bestselling novels have been tragedies.
The reason for this is that most people live in the feeling that they have not obtained the happiness that they were seeking. It is because of this that tragic novels touch a person’s heart in a way that comedies rarely can.
It is a very strange aspect of human life that for many people, the first half of life is spent searching for happiness, and the remaining, second half is spent in the feeling that despite having accumulated many things that they thought would make them happy, they have failed to achieve the joy they were seeking.
This general phenomenon, that runs through human history, tells us that the purpose of this present life is not for us to build a world of pleasure for ourselves in this world. The purpose of this present life is only this—that through good actions, we should make ourselves capable of obtaining the ideal world of joy, which is Paradise, in the eternal life after death. The stage of life before death is the stage where one can work to become eligible for Paradise after death. The stage of life after death is the stage of entry into Paradise, if one has proven oneself to be eligible for it.
