By Abdullahi Jamaa
How much is enough? There isn’t a particular answer to this question. It’s that simple, it’s that hard.
Many people seem to bite their own tongue when you ask them how much money or wealth is enough. Rich and poor alike, no one knows exactly how much is enough.
You can spend all your life making as much money as possible but it will never be enough. It is a wish upon wish to have enough of everything in life. And it goes, the deeper the pocket the more the hunger.
Unless you want to sell your soul and lose who you are, you will never get honest pleasure from life if your struggle is all about earning more and more money.
You have a lot more than money that is enough for you but you will never say enough is enough until you lick the dust in the grave. It is an abyss that many have fallen into unable to get out.
You will never find someone who has hung up his boots in seeking more wealth. When it comes to amassing and accumulating affluence, your calculator never stops, it keeps on counting.
When you don’t know how much enough is, you end up toiling for life, project after project and deal after deal. You remain to be a withering pauper no matter how vast your wealth is if you don’t realize that you have enough.
Full bread
You always want more, sometimes you don’t know what for? In your invigorated search for more, you may end up spoiling the little you have. Soon you may end up losing everything.
You struggle so hard in search of a full bread, you seek more and more in the marathon of life, sprinting to accumulate and amass colossal wealth. If you think constantly about profits only, you will end up making losses.
It becomes completely confusing to understand who is really rich or poor. Those who have full bread are working so hard to add another to their table while those with only half a loaf are struggling to make it full.
The struggle for wealth can be a cure for poverty yet it can turn to be a poison for life. Without satisfaction and contentment, it eats up the owner physically, emotionally and sometimes may occasion serious lifestyle diseases.
Except for some few guided people, wealth is indeed a punishment and trial for many rich people. In Islamic teachings, craving for more wealth can be a spiritual illness and a lifetime burden especially when the heart and mind of the seeker misses the purpose of life.
When craving transforms into greed and when one becomes a slave for wealth, the true meaning of life is lost. In such kind of environments, a person forgets himself into the miasma of avarice.
An avaricious merchant drifts away from realities, adversely affecting his relationship with God and with common people. The material and emotional attachment that one gives to accumulated wealth is always a delusion.
Attachments that emanates from lust for money and prestige is an unnerving tragedy that can waylay a believer. Going down the eccentric path of money, by money and for money drains down the soul.
Spiritual divorcement
Many wealthy individuals who have lost their footing in faith in pursuit of wealth have only lived to regret their life bitterly ever after. The life of a modern tycoon may be superlatively lofty and beautiful from outside but empty and monotonous internally.
Just as individuals struggle to amass wealth, the long and lumpy ropes of life tighten around them. Every inch of irreligious devotion to wealth escalates the reality of spiritual divorcement, sinking an individual into a void of profound dejection.
Caliph Ali (RA) is quoted to have said: “The richest of the rich is the one who is not a prisoner of greed”. Unfortunately, many rich people in the world of today are amassing wealth, building empires and worldly castles through endless avarice.
The messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: “Beware of greed (avarice), since greed destroyed those who came before you. It led them to shed their blood and make lawful what was forbidden for them” (Saheeh Muslim)
This is why answering the question ‘How much is enough’ is so important in our lives, it all goes back to how much can satisfy a person whether rich or poor. Finding an answer to this important question will be helpful for every individual.
It’s a billion-dollar question that has been a hard nut to crack. The poor enviously struggles, unable to unlock the jigsaw puzzle of life while the rich in endless avarice swims in the mirage of unsatisfying affluence.
Did not the Messenger of Allah (Peace Be Upon Him) say “Whoever makes the Hereafter his goal, Allah makes his heart rich and organizes his affairs, and the world comes to him whether it wants to or not. And whoever makes the world his goal, Allah puts poverty right before his eyes and disorganizes his affairs, and the world does not come to him, except what has been decreed for him.”
