There’s a Japanese idea called wabi-sabi that most of us in the West have gotten completely wrong. The Instagram version is a perfectly imperfect handmade bowl on a linen tablecloth, next to three artful twigs in a vase. Curated imperfection. It’s lovely to look at, and it has almost nothing to do with the real thing.
The real thing is harder. In English it usually gets boiled down to three short sentences. Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished. Nothing is perfect. Sit with those for a minute, not as a decorating style, but as the truth.
Nothing lasts. The body you had at thirty-five doesn’t. The marriage you thought was forever might not. The career you spent twenty-five years building might not. Your parents don’t. And the version of you that knew how to be, the mother of little kids, the wife, the woman who had it all figured out, she doesn’t last either.
Nothing is finished. You aren’t done becoming who you are. The chapter you’re in isn’t the last one, even if it feels like an ending. Your relationship with your body is still changing, and so is what you understand about love. You’re still a work in progress, at any age. That isn’t a failure. That’s how it’s built.
Nothing is perfect. Your life doesn’t look like the brochure, and neither does anybody else’s, whatever their Instagram says. Your choices were imperfect, your timing was imperfect, your body is imperfect. None of that is something to fix or hide. It’s something to live in, all the way, without apologizing.
I found wabi-sabi when I was trying to fix everything about my life at once. I was in Florida. My marriage was over. Things with my daughter were broken in ways that felt permanent, my career was in flux, and my body was doing things I didn’t understand and my doctor wasn’t explaining. I was reading everything I could get my hands on, looking for the thing that would make it all make sense, and I found those three sentences. They stopped me cold.
My first reaction was despair. If nothing lasts, what’s the point? If nothing is finished, when do I get to rest? If nothing is perfect, why bother trying? The second reaction came days later, and it was relief. If nothing is permanent, then the awful thing I was in wasn’t permanent either. If nothing is finished, I wasn’t behind, I was in the middle. And if nothing is perfect, I could finally stop performing a version of my life that never existed and start living the one I actually had.
Wabi-sabi isn’t about loving your flaws. It’s about realizing that flawless was never the goal. Your body changed? Of course it did. The question isn’t how to get the old one back, it’s how to live in this one with some care. Your life is a mess? Of course it is. The question is whether you can find something beautiful in it, not in spite of the mess, but right in the middle of it. You feel unfinished? Of course you do. You’re not supposed to feel complete. You’re supposed to feel alive, and alive means still becoming.
I still have the journal I kept in Florida. The handwriting is tight and fast, the way it gets when you’re trying to outrun something. Sometimes I read it and I don’t recognize the woman who was trying so hard to fix everything. I understand her. But I’m not her anymore. That’s wabi-sabi too. She didn’t last, and I’m not finished.
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