Wabi Sabi

by Beth Kempton

  Everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete.

  One of the core teachings of wabi sabi is the acceptance of the true nature of life: everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete.

  In this chapter, we are going to look at that acceptance in relation to ourselves, and in relation to our past, present and future. By the end, I hope you will feel a shift, having experienced the release of tension and surge in personal power that comes with letting go of ‘perfect’ and accepting what is, standing on fresh ground with this new perspective.

  Things change. That’s life.

  Every time I come to Kyōto, it is familiar yet different. Buildings have gone up, buildings have come down. New shops have appeared, others have vanished. One favourite café has given way to another. Over the years, this city has been altered by war and earthquakes, fires and tourism. And, of course, the changing seasons are part of daily life here, a visual and emotional reminder of the passage of time.

  Recently, I met up with an old friend in Tōkyō, who I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. On seeing each other we both squealed, ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ although, in truth, of course we have both changed in so many ways. Since we last got together I have got married, had two children, built a business and moved house more times than I care to remember. She has spent time abroad, switched careers, battled an illness, lost a parent, learned a new language … Each of these formative experiences has shaped us, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

  Our lives, relationships, careers, health, finances, attitudes, interests, capabilities, responsibilities and opportunities are changing all the time. Sometimes the change is significant or fast, and you feel it as clearly as a rushing wind. Other times the change will be minor or slow, like a daffodil raising its head to the sun, and you have to pay close attention to see it.

  Nowhere ever stays completely still. And neither do we. Wabi sabi teaches us that dynamic transience is the natural state of all things. And as change is inevitable, trying to hold on to the past or the present is pointless and stressful.

  Over the many years I have spent supporting people through major life transitions, I have noticed how vastly different our attitudes towards change can be. At one end of the spectrum are those who are terrified of it, and will do absolutely anything within their power to hold on to the status quo, even when they don’t actually like it. At the other end are those who embrace change as an escape mechanism, often habitually, so that as soon as things start to get difficult, they jump to something else, often later chastising themselves for never sticking at anything. And there are many in the middle who recognise the need to change, and genuinely want to embrace it, but are stalled by fear. I wonder where you sit on that continuum?

  I was talking to a friend about the idea of transience over red rice and niimono (simmered vegetables) at his home in a rural suburb of Tōkyō. He gestured towards his garden, where a small bamboo forest stood and said:

  You can see change happening right there. The bamboo is growing all the time, and is also sensitive to its dynamic environment. It’s firmly rooted but flexible. When the wind blows the bamboo doesn’t resist; it lets go and moves with it. And still the forest grows. Think of the buildings in this earthquake-prone country. The ones that survive the shaking are those that can move when the trembling begins.

  Flexibility is strength. Be like the bamboo.

  I think I just had a Mr Miyagi moment.

  Stability can make us feel safe, but it is a precarious stability that is built on the misguided assumption that things won’t change, because everything does. When a sudden change comes from an external source – redundancy, a loss, an affair, an illness for example – the shock is considerable. Rigidity actually makes us vulnerable to that. If it hits us when we are desperately trying to hang on to what we know, it can knock us flat. But if we are accepting of what is happening (not necessarily happy about it, or condoning it, but realistic about the fact that it is going on), we may be blown about but not completely knocked off balance, and we can recover sooner.

  Accepting the past

  It is so easy to spend time caught up in the past, lost in nostalgia, heavy with regret, chastising yourself for not having made different choices or blaming someone else. Back then, you didn’t know all you know now. You didn’t have the same resources, environment or responsibilities. Perhaps you didn’t have the same outlook, self-awareness, courage or support. Or maybe you look back on the past as the golden years, when things were easier, you were more this or more that. But here’s the thing: the past is no longer here. Whatever happened, the good and the bad, it is gone.

  Whatever it is that keeps pulling you back, take a moment to make peace with it, then let it go. This sounds hard, but it can be as simple as deciding to do it. Write it out. Speak to a professional if you need to, or talk to a friend. Then pick a day – like your birthday, or the turn of a season, or new year, or next Tuesday – and make it the day you leave that particular thing in the past. It is only you that keeps paying it attention.

  Wabi sabi teaches us to accept that the past was then, and it was what it was. This is now, and it is what it is. Your life is happening right here, and every day is the beginning of the rest of it.

  Accepting the present

  Acceptance is alignment with the truth of the present moment. In this present moment, what is true about your life? You are holding this book in your hands, opening yourself up to ideas from another culture. Perhaps you are drinking a cup of your favourite tea, or you keep getting distracted by a fly buzzing around the room.

  Maybe your window is open and you can hear cars going past. Or the sun is casting shadows across your desk. Perhaps you are at the hairdresser’s, getting ready for a special night out. Or you have just come back to this page after an inspiring conversation, or a big argument, or some surprising news. Maybe you are reading this on the bus, or in your kitchen with half an eye on the oven to see if your pie is cooked.

  I wonder if you are hot, or cold or just right? If you can smell cooking, or the garden or the impending rain. Do you have music playing? Is the clock ticking? Are you soaking in the bath listening to the sound of your own breathing?

  Take a moment to think about the facts of your life in this exact moment. This moment is the one you are living right now. You cannot extend it for ever. At some point the pie will be done, the bathwater will go cold, the night will close in. Accepting that we cannot hold on to or control the status quo is a powerful teaching from wabi sabi , reminding us to treasure the good we have right now, and know that the bad will pass.

  Any time you feel stressed or worried, upset, lost or lonely, anchor yourself in the facts of now. Notice what’s going on in your body, and what’s going on around you. Feel what you are feeling. Know that this is just a moment, and soon it will give way to another.

  Any time you are feeling overwhelmed, try to accept that what is possible in the present is limited. You can only do what you can do. This is not a shutting off of possibilities, but rather a recognition of your own capacity, so you can stop expecting impossible things of yourself and give yourself a break.

  Any time you recognise a moment of true joy, soak it all up. Anchor yourself to the sights, sounds and smells of right there and then, so they can transform into a precious memory when the moment has passed, which it will.

  Lessons from Ryōan-ji

  I distinctly remember the day I first saw the famous stone tsukubai (washbasin) in the grounds of Ryōan-ji temple in Kyōto.

  I am nineteen years old, and I have stopped off at this temple on my way home from language school. Round the back of the main building from the famous raked sand garden lies an unassuming tsukubai , tucked into an enclave of mossy rocks and greenery. But I can tell by the attention it is attracting that this is no ordinary washbasin. Each of the temple visitors stops to look, crouch down to pick up the bamboo ladle, scoop up some water and wash their hands. One at a time they pause for thou
ght. Many take photos. It is clearly more than a ritual cleansing and I want to know what all the fuss is about.

  Up close, I see four characters set around a central square section, which holds the water. Still quite new to the language, I am proud that I can recognise the character at the top, which represents the number five. But I cannot read the others, and am puzzled by what is drawing the visitors in. Summing up courage, I approach one of the monks, point to the tsukubai and ask what it means.

  He says, ‘Ware tada taru o shiru’. None of these words means ‘five’ so I am still none the wiser. I draw a picture of it and go home to consult my dictionary and my host mother.

  We have everything we need.

  Eventually, I figure out that the four characters don’t mean much individually, but when you combine each with the central square , they become the four characters , which is the ‘ ware tada taru o shiru’ the monk mentioned. A direct translation would be something like, ‘I only know plenty.’ A more poetic rendition might be, ‘Rich is the person who is content with what they have’ or, ‘I have everything I need.’

  The message has been there all along. This is wisdom we carry inside us. Recognition of what we already have is the key to contentment. We just have to accept it, trust it and embrace it.

  What do we mean by perfect?

  The ‘perfect life’ that we are sold over and over is the one we see in adverts – a predictable, stylised version of the human experience that eliminates the dimension of difficult emotion and hard-earned experience. It’s often a shiny-haired, perfectly manicured, wrinkle-free picture of bliss, running on a beach, sitting in a beautiful home or laughing with a bunch of equally shiny-haired, perfectly manicured, wrinkle-free friends. Or it is the Instagram feed of the perfectly styled home, perfectly behaved children or perfectly honed body.

  If only we owned the latest handbag, or car or gym membership, our lives would be perfect too. What we forget is that the ads are showing manufactured moments in a movie-set life, and the stylised social-media streams are carefully curated brand stories, not real life itself.

  Either that, or the marketing professionals cleverly remind us why our lives are hard, in a way that makes us feel like things being hard is somehow wrong. Like we are doing life wrong.

  We all know this. Yet, even so, we rack up the debt and fill up our homes and schedules and minds in the pursuit of the perfect version that has sucked us in, instead of taking the time to figure out what really matters to us. It’s like trying to get instant nourishment from the plastic bowl of rāmen in the window of a noodle shop instead of finding the courage to step inside, take a seat at the bar, order in our best Japanese accent and show a little patience while the chef works their magic, so we can partake of the real thing.

  As a monk 1 told me over green tea, with a gentle smile on his face:

  Living is suffering. Getting sick is suffering. Growing old is suffering. Dying is suffering. We cannot avoid any of these things. When we try to resist them, we just compound the suffering, and delay our ability to respond. If, instead, you can embrace the actuality of what is going on, then you can flow with life. People think Zen is all about calmness and tranquillity, and living in some blissed-out state of good vibes. But actually, it’s about how you face your challenges: unhappiness, loneliness, worry, difficult emotions. It’s about learning to deal with what life throws at you, and acceptance of actuality is central to that.

  Acceptance is not about giving up or giving in. It’s about surrendering to the truth of what is happening, and then playing an active role in deciding what happens next. For example, if you are sick, it’s about recognising that you are sick, accepting that you are not at full capacity, giving yourself permission to slow down in order to heal and asking for help when you need it, rather than powering on through.

  Surrendering to the truth of suffering in any area of your life allows you to proactively decide your next steps, with clarity, compassion and a degree of ease. This teaching is many centuries old. And yet, we still resist it.

  There are many ways in which we inadvertently use perfection – and perfectionism – to stop us embracing life:

  • As a defence mechanism

  • As a stalling tactic

  • As an excuse

  • As a form of control

  • As a weapon

  • As a judgement metric

  • As a mask for a buried wound

  • As an extreme response to criticism

  • As a cloak to hide the truth

  How many of these do you recognise? Did you realise the idea of perfection could be so harmful?

  What do we mean by imperfect?

  The ‘imperfection’ that wabi sabi teaches us is based in the rules of nature. If everything is always changing, nothing can ever be absolutely complete. Therefore, nothing can ever be perfect, as perfection is a state of completeness.

  We often use the word ‘imperfection’ to describe a state that falls short of a perfection we have come to perceive as ideal, whether that is in objects or in ourselves, in looks, bank balance, achievements or elsewhere in our lives. Any thesaurus will readily offer you a host of antonyms for ‘perfect’, including flawed, corrupt, inferior, second-rate, inept, unsophisticated, broken and bad. No wonder we see the opposite of perfect as a negative.

  In order to eliminate the negativity around imperfection, we have to reject its use as the opposite of this fictional ideal state, and instead adopt imperfection as the ideal itself: imperfection is not a compromise.

  Imperfection is not somewhere on the road to perfection, where we have to stop because we’ve run out of gas. Imperfection is a snapshot of our journeys of growth and living at a particular moment in time. We’ve been so busy trying to get the car up the hill that we have forgotten to turn around and look out over the beauty of all that lies all around us right now.

  Imperfection is not a compromise.

  We need to trust and accept and be willing to say, I don’t know it all, but I don’t need to know it all. I know enough. I don’t have it all, but I don’t need to have it all. I have enough. And I am not all things to all people, but I don’t need to be all things to all people. I am doing my best to be all I can be to those who really matter. I am enough.

  This does not mean having no goals or ambition and giving up, nor is it to suggest that striving for something is a bad thing. It’s about getting really clear on why we want what we really want, outside of materialistic desires for the accumulation of stuff and the pressure of expectation from others. Let go of the push and the fight, the uphill battle to a place you don’t need to get to. You can take all that energy you have been putting into the pursuit of perfection and pour it into living fully now. And once you start experiencing the world in this way, it looks and feels like a completely different place.

  Revealing your imperfections

  Accepting imperfection is one thing. Allowing others to see it is another. Yet that’s often where we find common ground. Revealing our vulnerabilities, challenges, as-yet-unrealised dreams and quirky joys opens a window onto our hearts. People can see who we really are, and they are drawn to connect.

  Have you ever noticed how, when you find yourself in the presence of true beauty, your heart responds? It could be when you experience a person sharing their essence by speaking a gentle truth, or a love poem whispered on the wind, a tiny hand in yours or a moment of deep connection.

  Your heart’s response to beauty is the essence of wabi sabi .

  When we are tuned in, our intuitive response comes faster than the logical analytical response, so we can feel something in our hearts before we have time to judge, criticise, compare or get distracted. We can teach ourselves to experience others in this way too. To meet someone with our hearts, instead of just our minds, allowing our instinct and intuition to guide us beyond the judgement the mind creates based on what we see on the surface. And when we reveal our imperfections to others, we invite them to see us in a
similar way.

  I once cried on stage. Only once, but it happened. I was mortified. But the response from the audience was incredible. People didn’t expect it. They could obviously sense that it was genuine feeling, although I wouldn’t recommend it as a public-speaking technique. It does all sorts of strange things to your voice. But it allowed them to see my imperfections and to know that I was real. With nowhere to hide, I just let go and kept talking. The energy in the room shifted, as people opened their hearts to me, as I had opened mine to them. Afterwards, the book-signing queue was around the block, with many of those in the queue crying too, wanting to share their stories with me.

  There is a tendency among self-help gurus to say things along these lines: ‘My life was a mess. One day I woke up to it. Now my life is amazing and perfect. You there, with your messed up life, you can be like me and have an amazing, perfect life if you just read my book/take my course/join my workshop.’ But I don’t buy it. We are all works in progress. Some of us happen to have had the opportunity to reflect, and perhaps have a platform from which to share what we are discovering as we go but, in truth, we are all learning from each other. No one is in charge here. No one has all the answers. And anyone who pretends they do is either selling a false version of their story, or is heading for a wake-up call.

  We can’t possibly have it all together when we don’t even know what all the pieces look like. And the sooner we realise this, the sooner we can start honouring ourselves and each other for the imperfect treasures that we are. We just have to trust that sometimes, when the head cannot find the answer, the heart knows the way.

  Lessons from the bathhouse

  I cannot imagine taking a bath in a public place in England, but visiting the sento is still a regular evening pastime for many people in Japan.