Our choices are mostly unknowingly dictated by the socio-economic environment we live in. This world demands and imposes a great sense of perfection, symmetry, and proportions that apply to almost everything from our belongings to our physique. The sense of perfection has become the new scale of aesthetics in the modern world.
Recently I happened to go through a Japanese Buddhist aesthetic (Zen philosophy) called Wabi-Sabi. In short, it is the art of embracing the imperfection, acknowledging the real, and being content with being original, which I felt is truly beautiful.
In the past in our society we had a system where if some part of your cloth was torn it was stitched and used, the same with a chappal, bag, or whatever it may be. But the sense of perfection makes people think doing that is shameful and think of it as a symbol of poverty if our belongings are stitched or torn.
If there is an extra pound of mass on the belly or if the eyebrows are not threaded well, people think it is an imperfect condition, they think they failed in the race…and they feel sad about it. It may be because of the mental image people of what people idealize or because they are inspired by supermodels or that kind of lifestyle whereas Wabi-Sabi celebrates imperfection, originality, weakness, solitude, asymmetry, roughness, fragility, modesty and all such original conditions, without any judgments, as an exquisite state.
Wabi-Sabi asks us to be closer to the real form or condition than pretend to be something else. I think it’s an amazing perspective, it keeps us grounded, it helps us understand who we really are. It brings us the possibility of taking the right step of progress over perfection and today I am so much grateful to this amazing aesthetic perspective of Wabi-Sabi to have an imperfectly perfect life.
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