Allah Almighty says:
And rush towards the forgiveness of your Lord and a paradise that is as vast as the entire heavens and the earth, and it has been promised for al-muttaqin. (Quran 3:133)
I was reading a book called “The Principles of Happiness” by Jose Addison. He said that there are three things that are needed in order to live a happy life: Something to do, something to love, and something to look forward to.
Many times people go through the motions of this life, and they don’t have any real purpose.
3 Principles of a Happy Life
When we look through these three principles, I want you to think about it before we refer back to the Quran:
Why is it that we need these three things? If you have two of them, you will not be a happy person. And this is true Islamically speaking too.
But let’s look at our lives for a moment: Something to do, something to love, something to look forward to.
What happens to people when they retire? What happens to people when they no longer have a necessity of working? You know what they want to do? They still want to work. They start to feel like they’re losing meaning in their lives.
So that’s why you’ll see people, even towards the end of their lives, they have something to love, they have something to look forward to, but they have nothing to do!
And because of that, now we need to start thinking of work… they give themselves work, ‘I need to walk around this much every day, I need to do this much every day…’
Because we all need to feel productive, we need to feel like we’re working towards something, or else we feel like there is nothing left.
Something to Love
Many times people are very busy, and they have a lot of work. They make a lot of money, their businesses are expanding, their wealth is expanding, their reputation is expanding, but the family’s falling apart!
The people that are friends with them are just friends because they want their money. And they no longer have any meaningful relationships because success has its price.
Something to Do
They’ve got something to do, they’ve got something to look forward to, but they’ve got nothing to love and life falls apart.
The wealth becomes the punishment, the success becomes the punishment in this dunya to them.
Something to Look Forward to
And then sometimes people have something to do, and something to love, but you know what happens to celebrities and people who went after Fame, they commit suicide in hotel rooms!
They say all they want is ‘to be able to go out with my family and have an ice cream cone without a camera in my face.’
The dunya wasn’t all that it was made out to be. Because the only thing that you do is you meet the standards of society.