Why the way of Wabi-Sabi is the future.

It is a warm autumn night. An almost full moon sits bright in the clear sky. Caught between buildings, flicking through tree branches, it draws the eye away from the road, the feet, the steps, towards the ephemeral.

As the road opens out, the moon is in full view. A thin wave of rolling clouds, like a blanket of ripples, fades in. Slowly the clouds float in front of the moon, its light more diffuse, the cloud itself brighter. It is a work of art, a perfect contrast of light against dark, grander than any painting or poem, created by a random coincidence of natural elements and perspective.

Minutes later the clouds have passed, dissipated, leaving the moon once again alone on the night canvas, that brief instant of natural beauty is gone, never to return in exactly the same way. It was a moment to savour, to experience for what it was, an evanescent spell that would have been broken as soon it tried to be captured for Instagram. The fleetingly beautiful.

Consider a different man-made beauty.

The Beauty of Broken Things

Kintsugi, or golden joinery, is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. It takes something tragic and turns it into a work of art. Rather than simply repairing the pottery in a way that attempts to hide the breakage, it uses that brokenness to create something unique and beautiful by highlighting the cracks and joints with gold. Now more than it was, the pottery is something to be admired; it is imperfectly perfect. It is unique.

The idea of repairing broken pottery is largely foreign to most people in modern, consumer society. Unless the pottery, or ceramics, was of some personal value, most people would just throw it away, lamenting the inconvenience more than the loss. When was the last time anyone repaired their broken IKEA pasta bowl? If you need another one, you can just pick it up next time you are out. It is replaceable and one pasta bowl is not different from the next.

This makes Kintsugi admirable in two ways. One is the act of repairing, seeing an object as not simply replaceable but valuable enough to make the effort to restore it worthwhile.

Two, the idea of not trying to return it to its previous "perfect" state, which is what a typical Western repair job might do, but instead fully accepting its imperfections and using them to create beauty.

The clouds fleeting in front of the moon and the broken bowl repaired with gold highlights are two parts of the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: impermanence and the imperfectly perfect. Wabi-sabi has profound implications for how we see ourselves in relation to objects, especially in the age of post-capitalism and the climate crisis.

Criticisms of Capitalism and Consumption

Karl Marx, an early and insightful critic of capitalism, pointed out that the industrialisation and standardisation of production meant that the worker, unlike the craftsman, was alienated from the objects he made. Marx also pointed out that we are encouraged to put our value in owning objects and thus buying more.

However, not only is the worker alienated from the objects they make, but these days the consumer is also alienated from the objects they buy, in much the same way as a consumer is distanced from, and even mystified by, the means of production. The result is that objects become meaningless and have little lasting value because they are mass-produced, replaceable, standardised and perfect. This alienation from production and consumption leads to a profound sense of dissatisfaction.

The Origins of Wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi is many things, but it has its origins in the Japanese tea ceremony. The ritualised drinking of green tea had a long history among the aristocracy of Japan, but in the 16th century, a Zen monk and tea master Sen-no-rikyu, ripped up the rule book and recreated the tea ceremony that is still practiced today. He changed many things including the utensils. Before Sen-no-rikyu, the aristocracy had used very fine, ornate bowls and utensils; tools that symbolised their wealth and status. But Sen-no-rikyu replaced these tools with the simplest, plainest bowls and utensils he could find; hand-made pottery and wooden spoons. He did this to force people to focus on the present moment and the drinking of tea without being distracted by the implements they were using. But, at the same time, he also challenged and changed, conceptions of beauty.

What is beauty? That is a big question, one that is coloured by time, place and perspective, but then as now, beauty is very often associated with the perfect and the proportioned, and so the uniform and standardised comes to be seen as beautiful. Except that this beauty is fragile. One scratch, one scuff, one dent, and the object becomes tarnished. If it is not perfect we very often don’t want it anymore. The idea that grew out of what Sen-no-rikyu did was that beauty was not about perfection, it was about imperfection. It was about the defects, the deviations from the perfect, and the influences of nature making an object unique and worthy of admiration.

Wabi-sabi is different to modern design principles

American artist and writer Leonard Koren compares wabi-sabi with modernism, at least modernism in the design of objects. In modernist design objects are minimalist, sleek, smooth, perfect; not only does this give a certain pleasing aesthetic, but it also makes things straightforward to mass produce.

Wabi-sabi, in contrast, while it may be simple, is not minimalist in the modernist sense, nor is it sleek, smooth or perfect; quite the opposite. Wabi-sabi objects embrace roughness, imperfection, and natural form. Whereas the objects of modern life are intended to be, in some sense, everlasting - although they never turn out to be - in contrast wabi-sabi accepts decay, damage, and corrosion. It accepts that things can’t last forever. It accepts and even celebrates, nature in a way that modern life tries to escape or avoid.

The objects of modern design and mass production, although they attempt to be perfect, never are. They break and corrode, and because they do they either become outrightly unusable or lose their value to such an extent that we want to replace them and throw them away. Moreover, even when things don't break, the initial allure wears off and they become purely functional transparent tools. We are actively encouraged to continually enlarge, replace and upgrade our possessions but this continued mass consumption of throw-away, meaningless, items is polluting our oceans with plastic and our air with CO2.

So, what does wabi-sabi have to do with the future as the title of this essay claims?

Wabi-sabi and reimagining our consumption

The modern way of consuming material objects increasingly doesn’t work, not least because the mass production and consumption of goods are contributing to the climate crisis both through emissions and resource use. It is perhaps not the end of capitalism that Marx predicted, but the threats of climate breakdown are likely to cause a major shift away from capitalism and consumerism, at least in its current form.

This is because it is quite clear that the relentless desire for economic growth and profit through the production of more and more goods for consumption is unbalancing the equilibrium in the planet’s climate systems to the point that some people believe our very existence as a species is at risk.

That means something somewhere something has to give if we want to give ourselves a chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. In the end, modern life cannot escape the forces of nature. While techno-optimists pin their hopes on a technological solution to the climate crisis, it is increasingly likely that we will have to change the way we live, consume, and think about the objects we own by adopting more sustainable models.

If we do indeed have to change the way we live, wabi-sabi can provide ideas for alternative ways of creating, consuming and caring for the objects we bring into our lives. Simply by encouraging us to be more mindful of the objects we own, what they are made of, and how we maintain them, we can start to be more eco-conscious in our choices.

It is not that everyone needs to adopt wabi-sabi as the latest fashion, it is just that understanding and using some of the principles of wabi-sabi might help us to adapt to a way of life that is more in balance with the earth's natural systems, less consumerist, and therefore less destructive.

Learning from Wabi-sabi philosophy

So what can we learn from wabi-sabi? Here are some wabi-sabi ways to think:

First, we can't do without objects and possessions. We still need things for everyday use and certain objects contribute to our identities. However, we can learn to appreciate the objects we do have more and choose what we buy with more thought. This might mean owning fewer things, and instead keeping ones that we find more value in because they are somehow unique, high quality or easier to maintain. Appreciating what we have also means not rushing out to needlessly replace or add to what we already have because of changing fashions or the latest model.

This leads to the second point about craftsmanship. We still need people to make objects, but small-scale scale locally crafted items from natural materials are a perfect antidote to the polluting mass production of plastic goods. Because items are crafted and not mass-produced, they will be less perfect, more unique, and more meaningful in a wabi-sabi sense. Locally crafted goods also reduce transport emissions and encourage local economies. Moreover, crafted goods are often easier to repair and maintain, and then reuse or recycle.

The third point is about embracing imperfection and using repair work as a gateway to creativity. As discussed above, Kinsugi takes broken pottery and makes it more beautiful. Similarly, the Japanese art of Sashiko is a style of embroidery often used to repair clothing in a way that is beautiful and unique. Reusing and repairing goods and objects means we reduce the amount of wasted resources and answer a call to be creative, but it requires accepting imperfection. This relates back to craftsmanship as well.

The fourth point is that wabi-sabi can lead us back to nature. One consequence of modern life and its methods of production is that it has distanced us from nature and natural processes, especially in urban lifestyles. Nothing in nature is perfect in the sense of being uniform, sleek and without flaws. By accepting wabi-sabi aesthetics and the concurrent deference to natural processes, we can integrate a deeper understanding of nature into our lives, flowing with nature rather than trying to subvert it.

This reshaping of our concept of beauty is the hardest but most essential step to applying wabi-sabi. It means letting go of a lofty, idealised beauty as a form of perfection, and coming back down to earth and discovering beauty in the natural things around us. This reorientation of values towards a wabi-sabi approach will help us to live more sustainably, it will also make us happier because it helps us to appreciate what we have and releases us from the endless race to the next purchase.

Being more wabi-sabi will help to break the downward spiral of consumption that is driving climate change and therefore help to make the future better for the planet and better for you. And in that sense, wabi-sabi is the future.

Eight more wabi-sabi inspired tips for living:

1. Understand that something doesn't have to be new, sleek, smooth, or perfect to be beautiful.
2. Realise that natural materials are better for the environment and add more meaning to your life; i.e. avoid plastic as much as possible.
3. Aim for quality and things that will last. A few expensive quality items will serve you better than lots of cheaper poor quality ones.
4. Take a long view and consider how an object will age with time and use. Many things get more beautiful with age.
5. Don't aim for permanence. Understand that things will wear over time, that this can’t be avoided, but quality items will age well and the wear can add to the aesthetic.
6. Favour craftsmanship over mass-produced goods, which reduces alienation for both the worker and consumer and generally makes for a better quality product.
7. Make an effort to repair and keep using something rather than just replace it. Aim for creative repair work.
8. Reclaim and repurpose old wood, furniture, and clothes. You can find many quality second-hand items these days.

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-dirty-door-door-knob-259832/