Applying_Kaizen_to_mid_life_crisis

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. My dear brothers and sisters, people go through what is called a midlife crisis. And this happens for two reasons. One is that when you are young and you have your life goals, most of them are more or less straightforward and clear, which is to get a job, to get a good job, to get some career progress and so on. So people work for that. And they achieve various levels of success. But once they reach a particular level, they would have achieved most of whatever they set out to achieve. Some things they get, some things they don't get. And also as you grow older, your overall energy also becomes less. And you reach a plateau, you reach a point and then it's, you are climbing to a point and then it becomes flat. And then there is a loss of energy, loss of enthusiasm. There's a sense of loss of purpose. You don't know what to do with yourself. Also, most of the material goals of life get achieved. If you have been, living your life in a reasonably sensible way, then achieving material goals is not such a big thing. So you will achieve whatever material goals there are. So then there's a loss of purpose. So that's one midlife crisis or reason for it. Another one is that you set out to achieve goals and these are good grand goals, big goals. And you find as you go, you go along that despite your best efforts and so on, you are not able to achieve them or not able to achieve them entirely as you envisaged or as you thought you would like to achieve them. So these are the two reasons why people at, usually happens to people in their 40s and maybe later actually, maybe in the 50s or so, but can happen at any time. I've seen people with very fast track, even in their 30s, facing this wall, they don't know what to do. Whatever they thought they wanted to achieve, they achieved, came very early. And then they are at a loss. Now what to do? The issue is therefore what to do with your life because it's, you feel various people I've spoken to, one person said, I think my life has come to an end. But you are still living. So how is it at an end? And you can't say, go jump over, jump off a cliff or something. Life is ended. That we can't do. So what to do with your life? And sometimes it becomes a serious matter because there is a serious loss of purpose in life. And, you know, you are sort of at a completely loose end. You don't know what to do with yourself. Now, the key thing, therefore, to understand is what does Islam tell us. Now Islam tells us to relook and realign the purpose of our lives. And that realignment should be done not only when you are at a midlife crisis, at that time, of course, but even otherwise. And that realignment has to be done according to the purpose of life. And that purpose of life, Allah SWT mentioned, where He said, وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونَ Allah said, we have not created the jinn and the human beings for anything other than our worship. So the purpose of life is to worship Allah SWT to a level that He is pleased with us. Because worship is not just worship. Worship is at some standard. So what is that standard? The standard is the rida of Allah. Now, if you keep that life goal as a purpose, then there is no question of any midlife crisis or any other kind of crisis because this is a continuous improvement goal. What the Japanese call kaizen. In manufacturing, there is the concept, quality concept of kaizen. So, kai is continuous, zen is good. So, continuous, improvement. And the principle of kaizen is that small things add up to a big thing. So small changes add up to a big change. So in this, if you apply the principles of kaizen to the life goal in Islam, which is the rida of Allah SWT, so you have the goal to say, is Allah SWT pleased with me? And Allah created me for His purpose, for this particular purpose, which is His ibadah. Today, what has happened, somebody was asking me, I just came back from Kuwait last night. One of my friends there, he was asking me, how is it that you play people like, we all, I mean, we all talk about spiritual development and we all talk about these things and it's not as if we are insincere and liars or cheats or not like that. It's just that we, we talk about this as if these are desires. But if you look at people, in the past, our Salaf Salheen, for example, Imam al-Ghazali, Rahmatullah Ali, left his home, he settled his wife, his son had died, he had only daughters, he settled his wife and daughters and he left his home and went out and did not come back for 10 years. And he went out because he said, my heart has become hard and for the softening of my heart, I need to do something, some other things. And when he left, he was the, Dean of his area of expertise in the Jamia and Nizamia, which was the biggest university in Damascus. So he had a very, very lucrative and senior position and that was at a very young age. So effectively, he hit a ceiling at that point. He, you know, got his midlife crisis. And even though, so fast track career, we reached Plato quickly. And then, he didn't know what to do. So he said, I have to leave this and I must do something about my heart, which has become very hard. So for the softening of the heart, he left his house and he went and he traveled all over the Muslim world. Two years he spent in the, in the Jamia, in the, in the main masjid in Damascus as a janitor, sweeping the masjids and cleaning the masjids. Two years. And remember, today, I'm telling you that he left his home for 10 years. And I'm saying that because we have read this in history. But when he left his home, he was, he didn't go out for a 10 year course. He went for the softening of his heart. It so happened it took 10 years. It could have taken, you know, 25 years. He would have never come back. We don't know. So this friend of mine asked me, he said, how is it that, you know, these people, I mean, they are also human. They also had feelings. They had families and so on and so forth. How is it that they were able to do things like this? And they wrote things. I mean, if you take Imam al-Nawawi, Rahmatul Ali, the number of books that Imam al-Nawawi, Rahmatul Ali wrote, take Imam al-Shafi, Rahmatul Ali, what all work he did. And to all the, I mean, if you take the Salafi Salihin from the Sahaba down to the Tabi'in and later, each one of them is an amazing story in themselves. But yet, they still had the same 24 hours that we had. It's not as if the, you know, day was longer or something. And in terms of resources, they always had less than we have, because if you look at all our gadgetry and computers and whatnot, we are, our life is much easier. When somebody like Imam al-Nawawi was writing, he had to write by hand. I mean, there was no computers, there was no cut and paste. There was no auto correct. And you wrote, you wrote, you wrote correctly. You, if you had to, you know, rewrite something, it meant to tell them, throw away that page and you write from scratch all over again. There's, you know, there's no saving here or whatnot. Despite that, the kind of productivity they had is phenomenal. Even to this day, with all the gadgetry that we have, it is probably safe to say that it's impossible to reach the levels of productivity that these people had. So how didn't they have this? And my, my conclusion to that, so that's why I said this issue, that's why I said it, that's why I said it, that's why I said that issue, I think it's crucial that we get the issue of continuous improvement, issue of Kaizen with applied to life, which is that they focused on the small things. They didn't, the main goal was there, the biggest goal, which is the Rida of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. There's no doubt about that. But how do you get there? It's the lack of focus on granularity, which prevents us from achieving the big goal. So, goal and then we are saying, I want to do this, I want to do this. But if you say, what is the granularity? What is it that you need to do today in order to reach that goal at whatever time that happens? What is it that I must do now? What is it that I must do today? I think this is the secret of Kaizen. The secret of Kaizen is it makes you and helps you to define that. What is it that I will do today? And that's why they say, Kaizen is the result, big goals are the result of small goals. So you make small improvements. And continuously you do that until you get a major change which you can which you can see. And that is the that is the thing that these people did. So whether it was Imam al-Ghazali, whether it was whoever else, the point is that they were focused on saying, what is my goal? My goal is the rida of Allah, that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala should be pleased with me. And for that, what do I need to do today? And that today was very clear. So for example, if it is a time for Salah, what is it I must do? I must pray. That is the number one point at this. At that point in time, that is the number one priority. I must pray. I must pray in the masjid. If I'm a man, I must pray by Jam'ah in a masjid. So on the face of it looks like a small goal, right? What's so big? What is so big? What's so great, especially, you know, in most of our countries, the masjids are so easily accessible and so on. So it looks like a small goal. But you know, I know, is it a small goal or is it a big goal? Because that is the small goal we are not able to do. Most of us are not able to go and pray, especially in the masjid. On the face of it, how big is it? What's so difficult about that? You don't have to fight some battle to go there. You're not swimming across a river to go, nothing. But that small goal, takes you to the big things. Because the whole point is that if you say that my purpose in my life is the rida of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created me for his worship and Allah said this,