Maulana Wahiduddin Khan I The Sunday Guardian I Nov 21, 2021
If you can be satisfied with what you already have, you can certainly achieve happiness. But if you can only be satisfied with more and more material things, you can never achieve happiness. Happiness is a state of mind. Nothing of a material nature can bring you happiness.
If you have in your mind a list of all the material things that you want and you believe that by acquiring every single thing on that list, you will be happy, then it will be impossible for you to attain happiness. The fact is that this material list has an end on paper, but not in your mind. If you do not learn to stop your mind running on in this way, it will keep on adding on more and more items. And, you will always remain insatiable.
If you want to live in a state of happiness, you must learn the difference between need and desire. The real needs of a human being are quite limited. There is always a full stop in the list of real needs, but the list based on desire has no full stop. Every day you will include a comma, and this will continue endlessly till the day you die. A human being, by nature, is insatiable. So, it is not abundance that will give you happiness – only contentment.
For my part, I can say that I am living in a state of happiness in the sense that I am contented. I believe that what I have is quite enough for me. This formula has given me an everlasting sense of fulfilment. I say of myself that I am the greatest ‘status quoist’. And it is having such a nature that has given me lasting contentment.
Being a ‘status quoist’ is not a minus point in one’s personality. It is rather the greatest plus point. One who is a ‘status quoist’ is saved from all kind of distractions, and when you are saved from distractions, you have enough time to do all kinds of good things, for example, study, think positively, perform social service, and so on.
Happiness is not simply a personal condition. Happiness is of great and far-reaching value. If you are unhappy, you are bound to live in a state of tension and stress, which is of no good either to yourself or anyone else. But if you are happy and are tension-free, you will have no stress, you will be free of pessimism and you will be able to reach out to other people. Then you will have a positive personality, and a positive personality is the greatest asset to human development.