The Happiness
We All Look For
According to God’s creation plan, the life before death is to make oneself a deserving candidate for Paradise. And the stage after death is of finding Paradise as a matter of merit. Paradise is the world of happiness which every soul has sought all along in this world.
I once visited a place in Rajasthan along with a friend, one Maulana Taqi Ameeni (d. 1991). We went to meet a family living in a farmhouse far away from the hubbub of city life. They could live there because the husband had inherited a substantial amount of wealth from his father.
He married a girl of his own choosing and then the couple started living in this farmhouse. Apparently this abode offered a beautiful world, but the man and woman who lived in it, presented a picture of utter sadness.
Both of them married as they had pleased and then started living a happy married life in this farmhouse. Maulana Mohammad Taqi Ameeni and I stayed there, for a night and a day. But during our stay, I did not even once see the husband and the wife talking to each other. This farmhouse which had earlier been the cradle of happiness, now looked more like a graveyard of depression.
I have seen many such people in my life, some Muslims and some non-Muslims. They were people who had earned a lot of money by dint of hard work, but once having acquired wealth, they found that there was no happiness for them in mere material things.
Some marry to please themselves but very soon realize that marriage is a thankless responsibility, far from being a life of happiness. Some dedicate their whole lives to politics, so that they may reach the seat of high political power. But after achieving this political power, they find that happiness had already deserted them. A certain individual’s target was a grand and spacious house, but by the time the house was ready, his face had started wearing a desolate look.
The most unfortunate aspect of the present world is that, human beings so often have to face tragedy. Great writers have written thousands of novels in every language. These novels realistically represent human emotions, yet the strange thing is that a comedy in any language is seldom popular. All the really popular novels in the world have been tragedies.
The reason is that every human being lives with the feeling that he has not been able to find the happiness that he desired. That is why tragic novels touch the human heart, while comic novels fail to do so.
It is a very strange aspect of human life that the first half of it passes with every human being in pursuit of happiness, while the other half of it passes in the realization that despite getting all objects which are supposed to produce happiness, he has not been able to build the world he desired.
History tells us that the present life of human beings is not meant for creating a world of happiness. The purpose of the present life is for man to do such good deeds as will make him worthy of finding the desired world of happiness in his eternal life after death.
The stage of life before death is that of making oneself a deserving candidate for Paradise. And the stage after death is that of finding Paradise as a matter of merit. This means gaining entry into the world of happiness in the next world which every soul has sought all along in this world.
