The Serious Mirth Society

Not being scientists ourselves, we are going to oversimplify this and likely incur the ire of those who actually are, but, in general terms, The Law of Conservation of Mass goes something like this:

The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form.

Wikipedia

We at the Society recently faced a frustrating dilemma and, upon remembering this law, felt ridiculously happy as it expediently and delightfully deflated our concerns. And, technically, our dilemma didn’t even have to do with science.

It had to do with art.

We have been cheered and inspired by all the colorful sidewalk art that’s been popping up all over the place recently—people writing kind messages on their neighbors’ doorsteps and drawing pictures and other friendly things on their sidewalks for passers-by. As these things promote gladness and laughter, we at the Society wanted not only to promote this practice, but to participate in it as well! However, as mentioned earlier, not only are we not scientists, we are not fine artists either, and we feared our creative skills were not sufficient for the task. (There is a significant difference between laughing and being laughed at, and we are staunchly in favor of the former, not the latter.)

But then we remembered the Law of Conservation of Mass.

Not to put too fine a point on it, an offering of art is not actually, technically, creating anything. According to the Law of Conservation of Mass, nothing new is ever created. What we are only ever doing is one thing, and one thing only—we are rearranging things.

We laughed! We cheered! Our fear of creating sufficiently “good” art was gone. We would not create art at all—we would just merely rearrange things and see what happened.

And thus, the Department of Friendly Graffiti was born. With no time to lose, we sent forth our excited and impatient members to procure chalk and make a house call.

With the fear of “creating art” gone, all that remained was our desire to spread gladness and laughter and rearrange chalk pieces into different shapes. We rearranged two yellow blocks of chalk into a giant flat circle. We rearranged part of a blue block into other flat circles. We rearranged half a red block into a curved, warpy shape that looked like a smile. We rearranged a green block into several other shapes. All we did was move chalk around in ways that made us happy. And when we were finished, the chalk blocks that used to fit neatly in their box now looked like this:

The Department of Friendly Graffiti had planned to leave their work in secret, but the owner of the driveway caught them in the act—and was overjoyed to see the newly rearranged chalk. And yet even with all the huge smiles, one of the DFG members shrugged and said, somewhat sheepishly, “Well, it’s not Rembrandt.” And the driveway owner beamed and said, “It looks like Rembrandt to me!” And thus, the newly-rearranged chalk was christened Rembrandt.

And then, of course, it started to rain. And it rained some more. And then it rained even more, with a little snow and sleet mixed in for added measure, and within a few hours, Rembrandt had rearranged himself down the driveway and traveled into another new form of adventure.

And so: we at the Society would just like to encourage you, if you are nervous about your abilities at all, to cease thinking of any artistic endeavor as an intimidating undertaking of creation. Just offer your imagination and effort into rearranging pieces of the universe into shapes that bring you joy—because in a while, it will all be rearranged into something else anyway.