How Wabi Sabi Taught Me to Accept My Strengths, Worry Less about Weaknesses

As the photo above suggests, I am not a neat person. Nor am I an organized person. I make a hundred to do lists and lose them, I take meetings notes for my day job only to have them get lost in the Never Ending Story’s Swamp of Sadness of my computer. I have three email accounts with new unread emails numbering in the thousands (mainly catalog emails likely interspersed with highly vital communications).

For a long time, I picked on myself about this. Why can’t I be more organized?! I wondered. Why do I have to make ten versions of a budget and pay attention to none of them, rather than making one that I actually stick to? Why do I need to write down every little quote that strikes my fancy only to have endless strips of words like fortune cookies found within every pocket, purse and cranny of the house?

I am not a tidy person. Tidy people are “on top of things”. They reply to text messages within an hour; sometimes I will go for days, weeks or (yes) months with the message still unread and in my inbox.

I’m not proud of this.

And I haven’t given up. I am still striving to be better. But I have started to embrace the fact that it’s ok. It’s ok to be bad at certain things and better at other things.

I am really good at being present, which makes me Bad at Phone. And that’s ok.

I can’t do ten things at once, but if there’s a task I need to focus on unwaveringly for two hours, I’m your girl.

There are so many little things about ourselves that we nitpick, tear ourselves down little by little, until our confidence is bruised and we lose sight of the fact that no, maybe we didn’t clean the kitchen, but we hugged the baby and listened to their babbling and gave them a bath. No, maybe we didn’t spend an hour networking with influencers on social mediato perpetuate our side hustle income, but we took the dog for a walk and played with him while he had zoomies on the couch and piled all the stuffed animals on his head so that it was a big wild circus when he jumped off the couch. Or, no, maybe we didn’t call to check in, but instead we went for a long trail run because that’s what we needed.

There’s a garden in my town designed in the spirit of wabi sabi, a concept I knew nothing about until I found myself walking through the garden last year. And well, I still know very little—what I learned was from a 20-word plaque situated amidst some bushes there that I would summarize, without authority, as this: wabi sabi is seeing and celebrating the beauty in imperfection.

That idea stole a pocket of my heart and slowly started to work wonders inside of me since that first day that I walked in the garden.

It planted all sorts of seeds in my mind:

Maybe I didn’t have to tear myself down for not doing this or that, not being this or that. Maybe I could revel in the things I did do, or things that I am, rather than am not. Maybe it’s ok that I’m not good at all of it, but I’m good at some of it.

Maybe it’s ok to accept myself, is really what it all comes down to.

The photo that appeared when I searched for wabi sabi. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash