Wabi Sabi - Beauty in Imperfection

Perfection will never be attainted, beauty is found in the mistakes we make, and true happiness is found when we let go and just live! I read this article today and thought it was worth passing on:
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“In Japan there is an entire world view that appreciates the value of the imperfect, unfinished and faulty. It's called Wabi Sabi, where the first term refers to something simple and unpretentious, and the second points to the beauty that comes with age. Wabi Sabi is the aesthetic view that underlies Japanese art forms like the tea ceremony, calligraphy and ceramics. It's an aesthetic that sees beauty in the modest and humble, the irregular and earthy. It holds that beauty comes with the patina of age and in the changes that come with use. It lies in the cracks, the worn spots; in the green corrosion of bronze, the pattern of moss on a stone. The Japanese take pleasure in mistakes and imperfections.



Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regimen we follow, no matter which self-help guru or meditation practice we follow, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of the human experience. A hundred years from now, there will be all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind, no you or me -- gone, and who knows where, if anywhere.


Yet knowing the extent of our limitations, feeling our soon-not-to-be-hereness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here at all. That is the brilliance of the human design plan -- the built-in "defect" is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us.


How did this happen? This incredible feeling, thinking, sensing, moving, joyous, painful, doubting, wondering life -- what keeps it upright even now, right now in this unrepeatable moment that is already gone? No answer to that, merely the gasp of the breath as it moves in and out, and the pleasure of knowing that for now we are here and not elsewhere.

Better to taste it now -- this gritty, imperfect life that we have -- than to defer it to some more perfect future that may never come.”


- Excerpt from “The Pleasure of Not Being Perfect” by Roger Housden
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-housden/not-being-perfect_b_912731.html