For many of us, calendars, diaries, and yearbooks marked the arrival of a new year. The unused one from the year before rarely went to waste — it became a scrapbook of sorts. A place for doodles, secret codes, half-formed thoughts, phone numbers, and ideas that felt important in the moment.
Handwritten notes, smudged ink, messy, uneven lines. Imperfect — but deeply personal.
Over the years, I collected a lot of those and at some point, I decided it was time to clean up my shelves. It felt practical at the time.
Old diaries were discarded, with only scanned copies of selected pages treasured.
I feel sad about that decision now. I didn’t realise then how much of me lived in those pages — they were part of growing up, maturing together. Those clumsy lines on paper were akin to the veins of a tree, irregular in shape yet proof of years of existence.
I wasn’t aware of the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi then, but I felt its essence.
Wabi-Sabi invites us to see beauty in imperfection.
It encourages us to embrace the imperfect, the transient, and the incomplete — a cracked teacup, a worn-out pair of jeans.
It asks us to accept every crack, wrinkle, and stain not as flaws, but as quiet markers of authenticity — like a painter’s strokes on the artwork of being alive.
Suddenly, those old diaries felt dearer, and their absence created a sense of vacuum. Life is a mosaic, a collage formed by both perfect and imperfect everyday moments. Removing traces of imperfection does not make the image perfect; it makes it unauthentic — someone else’s life.
A chipped mug that brews the morning coffee — each chip carrying the memory of a day.
A weathered wooden table — scratched by years of family dinners, marked by countless cups of tea, holding a history no polish should erase.
An old photograph, creased at the edges — imperfectly preserved, yet holding a perfect memory.
While Kaizen teaches us to keep improving, step by step, Wabi-Sabi reminds us not to discard what time has already shaped.
One urges growth; the other, acceptance.
Perhaps a meaningful life needs both —
the courage to improve,
and the wisdom to keep what already bears our marks.
