Living the wabi sabi life

Wabi sabi is a Japanese aesthetic that appreciates beauty in imperfection, simplicity and the passage of time. Find out how you can welcome wabi sabi into your life.

- KAYLA WRATTEN

The Japanese have a knack for bringing ancient wisdom to the modern world, from wise proverbs to life-enhancing philosophies. There is ikigai, the method of finding your life purpose or reason for being, and shankankan, a philosophy which teaches the virtue of patience. The Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with liquid gold is called kintsugi, teaching you to embrace your own flaws and imperfections. If you could absorb all these traditional zen ideas into one philosophy, it might just be wabi sabi.

Pronounced "wah-bi sah-bi", wabi sabi is a concept from Japanese aesthetics that encourages us to see beauty in the "perfectly imperfect" and to accept the transient nature of life (of which the fleeting cherry blossom season is an apt analogy, the delicate flowers inevitably falling within weeks of blooming). Much like a sudden sense of nostalgia or an overwhelming emotion that you can't quite explain, the concept is a heart-centred experience and its meaning differs for everyone. As such, there is no universal definition for wabi sabi in the Japanese language, making it impossible to translate.

The phrase itself is derived from two separate ideas. Beth Kempton, Japanologist and author of Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life, explains: "Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. Sabi is more concerned with the passage of time, with the way that all things grow and decay and how ageing alters the visual nature of those things. It's less about what we see, and more about how we see."