Happiness is...

Everything old is new again

If there’s a colour that says “happy” - it must surely be bright yellow.

Happiness is on my mind this week, not just because happiness seems to be a good mode in which to operate but also because we are reading The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle (see previous posts if you’ve missed the whole going back to school thing). Turns out, Aristotle was pretty obsessed with the whole concept of happiness - what it means, how to attain it, and why it matters.

In my endless quest to simplify such complex concepts as happiness so I can understand them better, I thought I’d attempt to represent the idea through a simple text/drawing combination. Hence the first effort above - Happiness is a yellow crayon. While it is yellow (I used all the various yellows in my possession), the grey text seemed like it should have been written in… yellow.

But… the yellow didn’t stand out too well, so I had to outline with a bit of orangy-red… which felt like introducing a bloody battle into the darkness. Though I had a moment where I thought of Cohen’s line about cracks in the darkness letting the light shine in, this still wasn’t quite what I was going for.

Even though these all involved yellow crayons, none were quite right either.

Nor was this. Note that by this point I couldn’t even be bothered to write out the whole phrase.

I’m tossing this one back over to you… if happiness is not a yellow crayon, then what? Happiness is…