Topic: The Answer
Written By:
Muiz Ud Din
A question
had stuck in my mind since a long time. A question that no person or book could
answer. The question: Why do we suffer in our lives? Nevertheless, I got the
answer after going through a continuous chain of expertly experiences of twenty
years. One day on my way somewhere, I found a woman under the open sky without
any shelter; cooking a meal for her four young children. Sweeping the sweat of
extreme high temperature, impatiently looking at the boiling pot; they seemed
exhausted, very exhausted of their lives. I heaved a sigh of grief and moved
on.
Later I
encountered a boy, crying. I sat next to him and asked him the reason. He
looked at me and replied, “I had a friend and yesterday after waiting for four years
when I proposed her for marriage, she said that I was too late to propose her.
I wish I had told her at the first sight. She left me alone.” I tapped his
shoulders, wished him better luck and moved on. My journey grew unexpectedly
interesting when I found another boy of the same age, crying. On asking the
reason he answered. “I had a friend and when I proposed her she said, ‘how could
you think that way this quickly? We were just friends’. She left me alone.”
Though now I was speechless, just finding a way towards the answer to my
question. Slowly, very slowly I found myself moving towards the answer.
Further on
my journey I found rich kids with fancy dressing; surrounded by luxurious food
and cars. Unlikely, they seemed to be interested in the poor kids playing in
the streets who were laughing and running freely. But the rich kids couldn’t
play with them because their rank was higher, they were rich people and rich
people couldn’t play with poor people.So they remained looking at the kids in
the streets, feeling imprisoned; feeling lonely. On contrary, the poor kids
envied the life of the kids living in the bungalows. They wished if they too
could be rich enough to buy fancy clothes, to sit in the cars which didn’t
belong to them and to visit the parks as they did. I smiled and went on with a
new insight about life, about suffering; about everything.
Furthermore,
I met parents suffering for they had no kids. Some suffered for they had lot of
kids. People suffered because they had families to be fed. Others suffered
because they had no families. Many suffered because they waited so long for
someone and some suffered because they hurled the process. Most were rich so
they found their lives insecure, restricted themselves and suffered because of
their wealth. Poor people suffered for food and shelter. Some suffered because
they were studying in and many because they were not studying. People suffered
death and they suffered life. They suffered goodness and they suffered badness.
They suffered the truth and they suffered the lies. People suffered because
they loved and they suffered because they hated.
After seeing
all these scenarios my mind stayed still. It no more asked me the question,
rather it gave me the answer. It told me that we suffer because we think that
theirs life is better than ours. We think that we have no value whatsoever, we
always want to be good. We always want ease from life that’s why we suffer.
Life is not easy, it is rather tragic and interesting. We want things to happen
the way we want. That is not possible. Life is the way it is. If we are not
satisfied with what we have, we will always be crying for what we don’t have.
We keep crying for things that don’t belong to us. We keep crying for things we
lost in the past. We don’t stay where we are, with whom we are and with what we
have. We don’t love people who love us. We don’t smile in hurdles. We are
envious, possessive and greedy. We want everything good for ourselves.
Everything is about ‘I’ and ‘myself’. That’s why we suffer. I listened to the
answer my mind gave me and remained speechless. But deep inside, somewhere
within my soul, a sense of gratefulness took birth. And that gratefulness was
the only way to end this never ending suffering, nothing else. Being grateful
for what you have is the only way to a satisfied live, only way to end the
suffering. There and then I smiled, faintly but I did; that little curve on my
face gave me a hint that I got the answer.
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