I ran my eyes across the vibrant fan of colorful Moleskines. It wasn’t the little notebooks I wasinterested in. Rather, it was the beautiful colors. Somehow, it just seemed magnificent the way it was arranged, the way the bright red faded into a gentle pink, the lime green and the loud cyan. It brought me back to a time that has long since been lost…

Do you remember when crayons were an absolute joy and delight to use? There was a time in my life long ago when I felt happy coloring and drawing with those crayons. They were little wax sticks of childish wonderment. It was such a pleasure to open a new box of Crayolas, to hunt down the goldenrod yellow crayon so that I could draw my sun’s rays, and then later using it to draw a lion. Finding the perfect green for the grass, tossing away the weird blue-green one that looked funny…those were days of happiness: pure, innocent, simply happy.

I realized just how unadulterated that happiness was when I tried to write about the emotion. I thought of various ways to say it, tried to find a flowery literary string of phrases that could express that childhood satisfaction. But I realized that the best way to describe it is with a single simple word: happy.Who of us can really say that, as adults, or even young adolescents, are truly happy? The reality of the world takes its toll on us. The realm of money, grades, jobs, it all takes the purity of happiness away. We begin to find different forms in happiness elsewhere. We find it in our favorite foods, in our favorite music, in our best friends, in our lovers. But that state of happiness is mostly elusive. We may be able to fool ourselves that we are content and satisfied, but the truth is that our emotional state is in constant motion, a tumultuous sea of maturity. Only as children do we seem to be able to find that Zen-like state of simply being happy.It’s beyond my literary capabilities to express the purity of childhood happiness. I think it’s beyond any writer’s capabilities. We can try to capture in words the fleeting glimpses of what it is like to be a child again: the wonderment, the joy, the love, the smiles and virginal bliss of a spotless soul. But I don’t think words do it justice. Instead, try to remember the beauty of a child’s innocence. Try to find that memory of the truest of joys in your childhood, and for a few minutes, draw out that child in you and be happy. Simply happy.