Wabi-sabi

It is the pre-holiday season again.  The first of November is quickly gone, when all the Halloween decorations have been torn down and stashed until next year and all the Christmas decorations have been put up in the department stores with merry Christmas music blaring to help inspire you to do your Christmas shopping a little early this year.  Giving thanks doesn't sell material things, so the retailers just jump right over Thanksgiving and head for what will move inventory before the fourth quarter of the year is up in order to keep the stockholders happy.  What a world, what a world.

This time of year becomes entirely too compressed, too hurried.  There is the seasonal dread of the darker days and the cold temperatures, there is the requisite shopping to be done with equal parts of faked joy and drummed up enthusiasm that will culminate in one or two days of anticipated holiday bliss which never quite lives up to our memories from childhood no matter how hard we try.  Not to mention the stresses of travel, families getting together, and parties to be attended.  I find myself caught up in a whirlwind of holiday craziness that only subsides when I flip the calendar and realize that it is January 2nd which then leads rapidly to a post holiday funk.

I used to hate the coming of winter. The end of the warmth, the darker days and longer nights, but now I have come to enjoy it as a chance to read, to sleep, to watch a movie with one of my kids on a Saturday afternoon.  As to the "pre-holiday race to new year" time….it will require a little wabi-sabi thinking.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese philosophy that essentially encompasses the idea that nothing is ever permanent, nothing is ever perfect, and nothing is ever complete.  This imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness are things to be valued and cherished in and of themselves rather than constantly striving for some distant, ideal "finish line".  The idea that "I will be happy when__________" is an all to common phrase, especially in the Western hemisphere, as we strive for complete infinite perfection and are constantly stressed and disappointed when it is never quite achieved.

Nature is perhaps the very best model for this concept.  Nature is perfect in its incompleteness, complete in its imperfection, and the seasons quietly change never to allow permanence. The very leaves falling off the trees outside represent Wabi-sabi in their random, chaotic distribution and eventual rotting demise.  The same will apply to the snow, and the spring mud and melting that is sure to come.

Washing dishes is probably the first place I learned to use this principle. The dishes in my house never stay washed.  I would no more than finish one load of dishes only to have my kids hand me another set from the endless meal and snack cycle that goes on with a growing family. It would make me crazy! So, in an effort to avoid the straight jacket and padded room, I learned to let the frustration go and love the process - the sorting, the mess, the hot water, the soap, the cleaning, rinsing, drying and putting away - knowing all the while that it was all right that in another ten minutes I could do it again if I wanted.   My daughters' attic bedrooms are another place where I have to employ this philosophy as well - they are a mess and even after cleaning completely they never stay clean for more than three hours.  No amount of yelling, cajoling, or applying to their (as yet underdeveloped) sense of personal hygiene is going to keep this area clean, but when I stop and realize that in a few short years, they will be grown and gone to mess up houses and apartments of their own, I have to fight the urge to add a few more random pieces of clothes to the mess for a while longer.

Somewhat related to this whole idea is another theory of, "picture it already broken" because all things - even us - will someday be gone.  My favorite coffee cup is the example I use a lot.  I know that at some point one of my children (or myself) will knock it on the floor and it will shatter. I know that typically this sort of thing would have upset me, but since adopting the "picture it already broken" philosophy, I have found that many things come and go without my typical distraught reaction because I have already dealt with their loss mentally.  I notice them and treasure them a bit more because, in my mind, they are already gone.  A bit fatalistic in some sense, but it is oddly very soothing and when a favorite dish crashes to the floor, or a beloved childhood book is found in tatters,  I now find myself thinking, "yep, that's how I pictured it" and there is now space in my cupboard and bookshelf for a new favorite item to take up residence.  I feel that even treasured items are meant to be used and loved rather than placed on a shelf somewhere safe.  I have my grandmother's china set that my mom gave to her for a present - we routinely pull these out and use them for dinners in which I would actually like the plates to match or when we have more people to dinner than we have mismatched plates.  I know that these too will slowly meet with unfortunate ends, but they will have been lovingly used in the process.

How this all applies to this chaotic pre-holiday season is this:  I stop and notice the day for what it is - windy, rainy, cold, hectic- and then, rather than allowing the typical frustration and depression to take hold, I smile and see if for it's imperfect, impermanent chaotic beauty - the quiet melancholy of the fall season. For the holidays this year, rather than striving for the great traditional celebration in which time stops in a moment of perfect  completeness, I am going to rejoice in the imperfections, the craziness, the chaos of last minute shopping, the lack of funds, the messes, the pine needles on the floor, the dry turkey, the kid that doesn't like their present, and even the turning of the year into the dark days of January because, all too soon, this too will pass and the world will roll around to spring again.