On wabi-sabi, rest, and the beauty of a moment that does not have to be perfect to be real.
Summer is often offered to us as a promise.
A promise of rest, lightness, sun-kissed skin, long evenings, perfect photographs, and days in which we will finally become that calmer, happier, more relaxed version of ourselves.
We should rest. We should enjoy. We should return renewed.
And then summer arrives. With heat that sometimes exhausts more than it softens. With crowds, mosquitoes, tiredness, sleepless nights, wet towels, plans that change, and moments when we realise that even in the most beautiful place, we cannot completely escape ourselves.
Perhaps that is why wabi-sabi came to me at just the right time this year. Reading book about the Japanese wisdom of an imperfect life, I feel more and more that wabi-sabi is not only an idea about the beauty of a cracked cup, old wood, or an object that carries the trace of time.
Wabi-sabi is much more than aesthetics. It is a way of looking at life when we stop demanding that it be perfect. And perhaps summer shows us most clearly how difficult that can be.
Summer reveals. The body. Tiredness. Expectations. Relationships. Our need for everything to be special, beautiful, and worth remembering. Even rest can easily become another project we feel we have to complete successfully.
But nature does not rest like that. A tree does not try to have a perfect crown. A lake does not worry whether it is blue enough today. A stone does not hide its crack. A dog does not wonder whether it has used the day well enough when it lies down in the shade. A bird does not sing in order to be praised.
Nature simply is. And perhaps that is why it heals us.
For me, the most beautiful summer has never necessarily been the loudest one. It was not always beside hot asphalt, sun loungers, cocktails, and places where everyone is trying to catch the same sunset.
For me, it is often somewhere higher. In the mountains. Beside a cold glacial lake. Where the air enters the lungs differently. Where there is no need to prove anything. Where you sit on a stone, look at the water, and feel something inside you slowly stop trying so hard.
There is no perfect scene. Only cold water. The scent of pine trees. The trace of a cloud over the rocks. A body that finally does not have to be useful. A thought that does not have to become an answer immediately.
Perhaps that is my wabi-sabi. Not a perfect holiday. Not a perfect body. Not a perfect summer. But a moment that does not ask to be anything else.
In the digital age, we have become used to confirming almost every experience. Photographing it. Sharing it. Saving it. Proving that we were there. That it was beautiful. That we lived.
But some of the most important moments cannot be captured well.
We cannot really capture the moment when breathing deepens. When the shoulders drop. When, for the first time in a long while, we sit without a plan. When we hear a cricket, water, wind, a bird, or our own silence. When we do not know exactly why, but we feel we have returned to ourselves.
These moments may not look spectacular. But they remain in the body.
Perhaps summer does not need to be perfect in order to renew us. Perhaps it does not need many events, journeys, plans, and proofs. Perhaps sometimes it only needs a little less noise. A little more shade. A little more water. A little more time in which no one asks anything of us.
A wabi-sabi summer is not an escape from life. It is a consent to life as it is. To a day that did not go according to plan. To a body that changes. To tiredness that has the right to exist. To a relationship that is not always smooth. To rest that is not perfect, but real. Perhaps that is the most beautiful thing we can bring back from summer: not a photograph in which everything looks good, but the feeling that, for a moment, we stopped trying to fix ourselves.
That we sat down.Breathed. Looked around. And allowed life to be a little imperfect.
Because perhaps the most beautiful summer is not the one that looks the most beautiful.
Perhaps it is the one in which we finally do not have to look like anything at all.
Only be. In the shade. Beside water. In the body. In the moment.In a life that does not have to be perfect to be ours.