wabi-sabi for your optimism tool-belt
Ever drive yourself half-crazy trying to get something to be just perfect? Whether it’s a creative project, a personal endeavor, or almost anything at all, we can sometimes get a bit too wrapped up in the tiniest of details and stress ourselves out unnecessarily. At times like these, it’s important to take some deep breaths and reach to your optimism tool-belt for new angles to get out of the weeds and back into your flow state.
Something that might help you to tilt your gaze into a more poetic stance on a number of levels, would be to learn a bit about the beauty of wabi-sabi. Whilst this isn’t what wabi-sabi was created for, we’ve found that the simple truths it’s composed of can be quite helpful when applied to all kinds of situations.
There truly is no such thing as perfection, and the imperfections are precisely what makes everything (and everyone!) uniquely beautiful.
Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it. - Salvador Dali
If you’re not yet familiar with wabi-sabi and you’re looking at this page right now with your head cocked like that little RCA dog listening to his Master’s voice, read on so we may enlighten you.
Wabi-sabi is a beautiful, ancient Japanese aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It’s a simple, nature-based approach of embracing and celebrating the following three truths:
nothing is perfect
nothing is permanent
nothing is complete
Another way these are expressed is that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
It can be applied in a myriad of ways… In Japan, there are tea houses that embrace these beliefs into a full experience, with cracked tables, unmatched teacups, marred surfaces, etc… all meant to acknowledge & celebrate the grandeur of beauty to be authentically found in imperfection. This way of looking at things has generally applied to material items (i.e. the pic above - a detail we fell in love with from some severely worn out flooring in an old diner), but it extends deeply into the metaphysical, spiritual, moral, and state-of-mind areas as well.
What we’d love to see here at The Optimism Lab… is for more individuals to be open to allowing this knowledge to bloom within one’s heart, so that we may all view one-another in a more wabi-sabi-esque sort of light. To open ourselves to realize and embrace how some of the very things to be perceived by oneself as “imperfections”, are the very things that make us all shine. And whilst this isn’t exactly the way wabi-sabi is generally interpreted, we saw an opportunity to use this as a fun, effective tool to promote love and kindness. At The Optimism Lab, love & kindness is our jam.
We encourage you to love yourself for exactly who you are and realize that all the quirky things about you are what make you YOU! There will never be another like you… You’re amazing exactly as you are. Embrace what makes you weird!
If you know of someone who can’t seem to see or know his or her own true beauty, please describe a bit about that person in the comments below, and make sure you mention and emphasize what you see in him/her/they that simply shines like no other. In order to respect privacy of others, please don’t use actual names. Even if he/she/they never even see the comment, there’ll be someone out there who’ll be able to relate, and perhaps help someone dear to them. Let’s learn from one another about the little ways in which we shine that we may not even realize.
Let the love ripples flow.
Let’s inspire one another to shine on…
Today and every day <3
The Optimism Lab would love to hear about all your.experiences with all things wabi-sabi.
All around, no flowers in bloom
Nor maple leaves in glare,
A solitary fisherman’s hut alone
On the twilight shore
Of this Autumn eve
~unknown