The Joy That Keeps Its Shine

Most of our joys arrive with a shelf life.

The new phone thrills us for a week, then becomes the phone. The raise feels enormous, then settles into the number we simply earn.

Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. We adjust to whatever we gain, and the same pleasure returns a little smaller each time, until we are chasing the next thing to feel the first thing again. It is why the gift we longed for can feel strangely quiet the week we finally hold it.

Giving is the rare joy that keeps its shine. In one study, people who gave a small amount away every single day felt the same lift on the fifth day as on the first. The warmth kept returning, as fresh each time as it was at the start.

The pattern turns up across very different cultures, and in small children before anyone teaches it to them.

Something in the act refuses to grow ordinary. The tenth kindness can move the heart as much as the first, and the giver is quietly renewed by the repetition itself.

The Prophet ﷺ pointed here long before a study could measure it. He lived open-handed to the end, and the giving seemed only to enlarge him. He spoke of a barakah that does not run dry, a wealth that answers to a different law and multiplies in the spending.

This is the quiet arithmetic of barakah: an increase folded into the act itself, a growth the ledger has no column for. What we give is planted, and it goes on growing where we cannot watch.

The heart holds a reservoir that rises as it is poured out. The mind, in its slower tongue, has only now begun to agree.

Reflect on this: give something small today, and again tomorrow, and notice what quietly keeps returning.

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You have just felt, on paper, how giving lands lighter than the ledger says. Here is where it can land for real.

This is not a freak accident. In June 2015, flooding and a petrol-station explosion in Accra killed more than 150 people. In 2023, the Akosombo Dam spillage displaced nearly 36,000. Now, in 2026, the rains have returned and more than 38,000 of our family are affected.

Every June the water rises, and every June ordinary families pay for it. Islamic Ummah Relief is responding again, the way we should. 100% goes to families in Accra.

Hana could not sleep. Every worry she had ever met was lined up at the foot of her bed, waiting its turn: the spelling test, the friend who had not waved back, the sound the house made when the wind pushed on it.

“You cannot hold all of these,” said her grandmother, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Nobody can. That is why we give them back.”

“Back to who?”

“To Allah. He is awake all night. You are not. So you hand Him the heavy ones and you go to sleep.”

Hana tried it. She named the loudest worry out loud, small and plain, and then she whispered that she was giving it to Allah for the night. The worry did not vanish. But it felt lighter, the way a bag feels when someone else carries it up the stairs.

By the time she reached the third worry, her eyes were already closing.

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