Only Dead Things Stay the Same
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Most of us are living in the waiting room of our own lives—convinced that peace is one promotion, one milestone away.It isn’t. Stop waiting for perfect. Start living.
KEY POINTS
- We suffer from the belief that life should be perfect.
- Wabi-sabi teaches that flaws are not obstacles to beauty—they’re the source of it.
- Accepting imperfection does not mean you stop caring about quality.
In December 2006, my late friend and mentor Ito San took me to rural Japan for the first time. Our journey began in Yokohama and wound its way to the foot of the Japanese Alps, to an old ryokan called Yarimi-kan in the Shin Hotaka hot spring area of Gifu prefecture, nestled between Mt. Yarigatake, Mt. Hotaka, and Mt. Kasagatake.
“Come,” said Ito San. “It is time for kaiseki.”
I had heard of kaiseki before—a traditional multi-course meal based on the seasons. I had even had some kaiseki meals in the U.S. But this was my first true experience of kaiseki, and it baffled me.
The ceramics the meal was served on were imperfect—here a glaze that pooled unevenly, there a rim that wasn’t quite round. The ingredients were barely manipulated by the team of cooks, presented in way that was close to their natural state rather than being polished into something impressive. And the entire experience unfolded slowly, quietly, without any attempt to dazzle.
By every standard I understood, this meal should have felt unfinished and unimpressive. Instead, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I could not explain why.
The Trap We Live In
For most of us, most of the time, life is always just about to happen. When I get my dream job, when I have a million dollars in the bank, when I find the love of my life, then everything will be good and life can begin.
But that moment rarely comes. Or more precisely, it comes, but we find that it does not bring the peace or the joy that we dreamt of. Even after the promotion, after the windfall, after the wedding, life continues to move, to demand, to surprise, and, yes, to break. Life never graduates to a settled state, because that is the nature of life; indeed, it is perhaps the best definition we could have of being alive. Only dead things remain as they were, things that are alive and vital are in a constant process of becoming.
And we don’t just want things to be good; we want to know that they’ll stay good. We want the ground to stop shifting beneath us. But it never does, because being alive means not standing still.
And in the meantime, we suffer—and not just from the fact that life is always imperfect and unsettled but, even more, from our belief that it shouldn’t be.
The Word I Was Missing
The philosophy that kaiseki is built on has a name: wabi-sabi. It is a worldview rooted in three principles: nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent, nothing is complete. And rather than seeing this as a cause for complaint, wabi-sabi sees this as a reason for joy. It is a philosophy that celebrates the beauty in impermanence and imperfection.
The kaiseki meal that Ito San gave me expressed this beautifully. The imperfect plates, the seasonal ingredients that would be gone in days—the meal was a celebration of what is, rather than a longing for what we think should be. And over the years, I began to understand that this is what had moved me so much about that meal: It was a living demonstration that imperfection and impermanence are not obstacles to beauty but rather its source.
Modern psychology increasingly supports what wabi-sabi teaches. Research on self-compassion by Kristin Neff has shown that people who respond to their own imperfection with warmth rather than harsh judgment report lower anxiety, less depression, and greater well-being. Wabi-sabi is, in a sense, self-compassion made into a worldview. It says, You are imperfect, your life is unsettled – and neither of those things needs fixing.
What Ito San Taught Me
As someone who has spent decades building companies, I used to treat imperfection as the enemy, something to be eliminated before I could move forward. Every flaw in a product or a strategy felt like something that needed fixing before it was ready for the world. And as in work, so in life; every stage of life felt like a rough draft of the version that was coming next.
That meal with Ito San at the foot of the Japanese Alps didn’t make me stop caring about quality. But—eventually— it changed what I was waiting for. I stopped requiring everything to be right before I could act, and I stopped requiring perfection before I could feel at peace.
And now, almost 20 years later, I see clearly that the most meaningful work I’ve done—as an entrepreneur, as a writer, as a father—has come not from having everything figured out but from moving forward within conditions that were imperfect and incomplete.
3 Practices for Embracing Imperfection
- Notice beauty in something unfinished. Once a day, pause to notice something imperfect that moves you—a conversation that didn’t resolve neatly, a project still taking shape, a season that’s already turning. Notice it the way you’d notice a cracked bowl in a kaiseki meal: not as a problem but as something with character.
- Let something be good enough. Choose one task this week and release it before it’s perfect. Send the draft. Ship the idea. Notice that the world doesn’t end—and that something unpolished can still be valuable.
- Name what you’re waiting for. Write down the condition you’ve set for your own peace: “I’ll feel settled when _____.” Then ask yourself whether you’re postponing a life that’s already here.
Get Busy Living
Ito San passed away some years after our journey together. The mountains still stand, the river still flows. I have returned to that first kaiseki meal many times in memory and, eventually, in my own kitchen, preparing a seven-course meal to honor what he taught me.
He never explained wabi-sabi to me in words. He didn’t need to. He served it on uneven plates, in a wooden inn that creaked with age, beside a river that was never the same from moment to moment. The lesson was the experience itself. There is beauty in a life that is unsettled and imperfect.
As Andy Dufresne almost said in The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy living, or get busy waiting.
[Feature Photo Source: Nito/Adobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
