Imperfect Is Perfect for Now

One upshot of the current global financial crisis is that people are reassessing their obsession with what’s NEW. Those who can are still purchasing the must-haves, but nice-to-haves are being subjected to a new level of scrutiny. Industries that feed on restlessness–fashion, furnishings, travel, beauty, and even technology to some extent–are hurting as consumers take another look at what they’ve got and think it’s quite enough for now.

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Those waiting for business to pick up with the inevitable turning of the tides may be in for a surprise. Forced to consider the value of their possessions, more people are coming to understand the truth in an ancient principle that may render obsolete our cultural neophilia…or at least, give it a run for its money. The principle is wabi-sabi.

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Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic concept based on the idea of impermanence. It finds beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Recently, I read this succinct exchange about the concept in a Q&A in Spirituality & Health magazine:

Q: I’m moving into my own apartment and furnishing it with stuff I buy at garage sales and junk shops. The pieces I buy have dings, divots, and cracks. My father wants to refinish everything, but I think that old stuff has more soul than new stuff. Can that be, or is this, as my father insists, just my imagination?
A: Lived-in things have soul–character, mystery–and living with them can deepen our souls as well. Look into the Japanese aesthetic called wabi-sabi. First articulated by Murata Shuko, a fifteenth-century Zen monk and tea master, wabi-sabi sees beauty in imperfection: a worn table top, a cracked vase, a chair seat rubbed down with use. Living with these things honors them and gives them meaning and purpose. They “repay” us with a sense of value that the new and shiny simply lack.

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By choice or by circumstance, we’re embracing wabi-sabi in the U.S. and it’s about time. In the past month I have overheard no fewer than three conversations about Etsy and the joy of browsing a market of homemade goods. I’ve been invited to clothing swaps and seen people of means pull perfectly useable pieces of furniture off the neighbor’s curb. I’ve seen freegans scouring the trash at Trader Joe’s. And I listened with interest last week as two focus groups on travel talked about their preference for couch surfing and apartment swapping to hotels.

As Americans develop a higher degree of comfort living with the gently ‘lived in,’ innovators beware: this could be the new (and improved!) innovator’s dilemma.