🍵: About Being Perfectly Imperfect

That’s life in our world today:

- Ideal job
- Expensive car
- Symmetrical face
- Perfectly sculpted body

In other words: an existence without fault.

Unrealistic standards and strictly chasing an unattainable ideal.

And what does this hunt for perfection bring us?

Dissatisfaction.
Depression.
Burnout.
Anxiety.

Aren't you exhausted pursuing perfection?

If so, you should be happy to hear that there's a philosophy that can help us escape the hamster wheel of pursuing a perfect life.

Not only that.

It even teaches us to appreciate existence as it is: imperfect.

The Japanese worldview of Wabi-Sabi (侘寂) rejects perfection. It focuses on accepting transcience and imperfection.

It appreciates the beauty that's imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

An ideal can only exist in our minds.

A little dust is enough to ruin a perfectly tidy house.
A grain of sand is enough to ruin perfectly still water.
A small crack is enough to ruin a perfectly made pot.

But it's not only circumstances or things.

We as humans also aren't perfectly still, crystal clear ponds.

It's this ongoing sense of "never enough" which makes us depressed and anxious.

But this desire for perfection is a form of clinging.
Because we hold on to an idea or vision of how things should be.

And clinging lies at the root of suffering.

Only by letting these fantasies of perfection dissolve can we release ourselves from their torture.

Existence has no standard.
Nature merely creates things into the world.
And eventually, they all disappear.

Wabi-sabi is the experience of how things are in their imperfect, temporary state.
Not how they "should be".

Everything is supposed to age.
Everything is supposed to pass.
Everything is supposed to break.

That's the natural order of things.

That's why we’re better off accepting who we are and enjoying how things are:
Perfectly imperfect.