Word for the Wise: Wabi-Sabi
I love coming across a word or term I’ve never heard before, don’t you? We writers might feel a bit offended by encountering an unknown, unfamiliar, and perhaps exotic-sounding word that we should have already tucked into our arsenal somewhere (after all, we’re supposed to be omniscient wordsmiths). But the number of words in the English language is unfathomable and constantly evolving. We only use about 20,000 to 30,000 words in everyday language. The Oxford English Dictionary holds roughly 600,000 words, around the same number in the Old Testament.
I can’t keep up with the weird lingo my young sons bring home from school (e.g., rizz, sigma, skibidi), and neither could my parents when I overused totally rad, wicked, as if, and gnarly, among many other gems of Gen X. While some slang terms eventually do move to a more official status once they are anointed by a revered dictionary (e.g., bling, selfie, cray), I’d prefer to keep loading up my vernacular truck with long-established expressions.
Like this one: wabi-sabi.
No, that’s not a typo of wasabi, but it does have Japanese roots dating back to the late 12th century when Zen Buddhist monks introduced concepts of imperfection, natural beauty, simplicity, and the impermanence of things. Wabi refers to solitude or “less is more.” Sabi means attentive melancholy or beauty and serenity that comes with age and time. Hence, wabi-sabi is a philosophical concept that shuns extravagance and finds beauty in the blemishes of life. If you’re familiar with the art of kintsugi, which is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by melding the pieces back together with lacquer mixed with precious metals, such as gold, silver, or platinum, then you’ve seen the wabi-sabi aesthetic in the world of ceramics. The term may be deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture going back centuries, but it didn’t first appear in English until the 1960s.
See if you can find examples of wabi-sabi around you in both physical and nonphysical forms. For an added challenge try to use the term in a sentence and surprise someone in conversation. Here’s an example: “I’ve felt more grounded and less anxious since practicing the art of wabi-sabi in my daily life.” One more: “I’m taking a wabi-sabi approach to my first draft so I don’t let mistakes slow me down from getting the whole manuscript done; then I can go back and edit.”
I’ll test this term out on my sons too. Children, after all, are constant reminders of wabi-sabi. I hope they think it’s cool, rad, or dope.
Credit: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash