Looking for the Wabi Sabiness of Things

Wabi Sabi is an idea of Japanese aesthetics which tries to appreciate the beauty in the transient and impermanence of things.   Wabi refers to austere beauty.  It celebrates the ability to to make the most of simple beauty found through a impecunious lifestyle.  Sabi refers to austere refinement and makes allusions to solitude and beauty, and if often used to denote the deepening of beauty that comes with age.  Together they describe complex aesthetic view where beauty is imperfect, fleeting or incomplete.  An appreciation of this concept requires the observer to focus on the subtleties of the modest, the imperfect and even things which are dying and decaying.  It is a melancholy concept exemplified by things like the Japanese Tea Ceremony.  Richard Powell once noted that this concept exemplifies "three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”

While not obvious, I feel like even a big city such as New York City is full of Wabi Sabi.  Each time you return to Manhattan you are struck by the age of the old winding cobblestones found in and around the Dutch built Wall Street.  Huge crowds of disparate people crush you in Midtown and stately brownstone homes sit quietly as you walk through the Upper East Side.  Cities ebb and flow and neighborhoods change their character seemingly overnight.  Beauty and ugliness often exist in the same moment and space. 

I think there is value trying to find the Wabi Sabi in the every day.  Appreciating that things, seasons, and even life itself is fleeting, can only make one’s appreciation for the life they have grow and blossom.