A close friend of mine is suffering from a strange psychological problem these days. He is a happy businessman of fifty-two/ fifty-three years old. He is a self-made man. He started his practical life with labor, Allah blessed him and he had earned millions. He is now living in the posh sector of Islamabad. He has big business, very healthy bank balance and he pays more taxes than the total taxes paid by the political leadership of Pakistan. He is healthy, good looking and smart. He knows how to dress and live.
Allah has also blessed him with good and righteous children and he himself is a pious person, but despite this, his heart has become detached from the world and he wants to leave this world at the age of fifty-two. He says time and again that I have seen what I wanted to see in life, I should hide from the world now. He suffers from severe depression during this feeling.
He turns off the phone and lie down on the sofa in his office or in the basement of his house. He is aimless; his life has become dull and he no longer feels any attraction in the world. Indeed, Allah has a special grace on him, he is a religious person. If he was not religious or if he did not have a friend in his life in front of whom he could talk about all kinds of things, then he would have committed suicide by now.
He is not the only victim of this feeling in this country. Ninety percent of us are going through the same situation. Our heart is cut off from the world and we are looking for excuses to die. We want to die or want to kill someone and then die our self. The beginning of our anger is usually with these phrases “I will kill you, I will die, you will not be spared from me, my heart wants to sprinkle oil on him and set him on fire and I want to set the whole country on fire,” etc.
We also do dozens of actions every day that can increase our chances of death, for example, we will not cross the road at a zebra crossing. We will enter the road in the middle of nowhere and will start crossing the road between cars running at a speed of hundred kilometers per hour. We will start walking on the road. We will deliberately eat things that can give us cholera. We will buy medicine from the medical store and start treating ourselves. We will blindly eat all the prescriptions of Hakims and we will sit on the cylinder in a CNG powered wagon.
We’ll travel more than 50 kilometers hanging from vans and buses. We’ll pass through closed gates just as the train is seconds away. We’ll sleep on roofs in dengue and surrender ourselves to mosquitoes. We will deliberately drink contaminated water. We will drink the liquor of the local furnace that kills hundreds of people every year. We will kick our jobs, our livelihoods and create circumstances for whole family to commit suicide. We will certainly participate in all those protests in which government buildings will be set on fire.
There will be stone pelting at the police and finally the police will shoot at the protestors, what is this? All of these are decent ways to commit suicide. We are fed up with life, so amongst us those who are more fed up commit suicide outright while the rest of us keep looking for decent ways to die, some of them reach to their “desire” by accidents and the rest of the people, like this friend of mine, continue to carry the gift of depression and search for a religious, medical and social way to leave the world. Now the question arises. Why is it so? Why are we all suicidal?
Happiness is the only reason for our depression and suicidal thoughts. We are not happy and lack of happiness always leads to death. Medical science says that happy patients in the world live longer despite suffering from the most deadly diseases, while depressed and unhappy people die after a minor cold, minor injury and mild attack of cough. Happiness is the biggest vitamin and if we do not have this vitamin then nothing in the world can keep us happy and this vitamin is born from the habit of being happy.
If we are not in the habit of being happy, we cannot produce this vitamin and thus we cannot get happiness even after having all the comforts of the world. Ninety percent of our people are victims of this crisis, they have not been trained to be happy since childhood. No one told them that Allah created them in the most ideal time of the world. Man in today’s age can fulfill ninety percent of his wishes; he can become the richest person in the world; he can get a transplant from heart to hair; he can go to the moon; he can have a picnic ten kilometers deep in the sea; and cancer can be cured in the world today.
If you are rich or successful then the whole world is open to you and in this age a black man can become the president of America. No one told us that we should first enjoy what we have got and after that we should proceed to the rest of the longings and desires. No one told us that man is the only creation of Allah Almighty who is a combination of body, mind and soul. Plants and animals have body and soul, but no brain. While angels and jinn have mind and soul but not body, we have all three and all three are alive and need daily food.
The way we give the body carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and water, the way we take care of the cleanliness, hygiene and beauty of the body, we protect it from heat, cold, rain, injury and accidents and the way we treat it, our mind and soul also needs treatment, care and food. Just as if we do not give food to the body then our body withers, we become weak and lethargic.In the same way, when our soul and mind do not get adequate and timely food, they also become sick, weak and sluggish like the body and thus the joy and peace in our life decreases. Now the question is what is the food of mind and soul? Our mind needs new ideas, new information, new knowledge, new thoughts and new opinions.
Four thousand questions arise in our mind every day and our mind asks us to answer them, but we reject these questions of the mind, our mind becomes a graveyard of questions and the grass of happiness never grows in the graveyards. Food for the mind is books, discussion forums, sitting with intellectuals, television, theatre, film, art, research, archeology trips and contemplation, how many of us are feeding our mind with this food? Similarly, positive actions are food for the soul, every positive action in the world is food for the soul and every negative activity in the world is disease for our soul. Religions in the world are said to be the food of the soul because they attract man towards positive thinking and positive action.
They prevent you from backbiting, rudeness, obstinacy, greed, cruelty, hypocrisy, covetousness, miserliness and narrow-mindedness. These lead you to public welfare, service, tolerance, generosity, humanity, kindness, testimony, justice and worship and these are all positive activities which are vitamins of the soul. They create peace within the soul and this peace becomes happiness and shines on our face and eyes. The food of soul means positive behavior, food of mind means study and food of body means a balanced diet. They need training and we are not giving this training to our children. So every one of us gets depressed when we reach the age of youth and middle age. Our life becomes aimless; we get sad and this sadness leads us to commit suicide. Hence, most of us have become suicidal in personality and we have no escape except happiness.