By: Nocholas Coyne
Wabi-sabi is an Eastern philosophy that emphasizes the beauty of solitude, imperfection and humility. Wabi-sabi celebrates the things we correct on a daily basis; like an erratic part in hair we quickly scruff away or an indiscernible stain in a shirt that can’t be washed away. While many modes of aesthetic philosophy appreciate grandeur and regal manifestations of the soul, wabi-sabi is conceptualized through simple, off-kilter design, posture, mentality.
It isn’t necessary to alter your approach to everyday life to understand what is alleviated when following a wabi-sabi mentality. That is what makes the practice so intimate, because only you will recognize the effect of seeing life as incomplete alignment through its subtle, asymmetrical qualities. Wabi-sabi celebrates not what something lacks, but what unique properties every sentient and non-sentient being contains.
One criticism I’ve encountered of wabi-sabi is that it is a philosophy that celebrates laziness, or it settles for lackluster development of aesthetics or philosophy. However, I think wabi-sabi abandons the futility of achieving some mode of thought that reveals a higher truth, but it accentuates the subtle examples of the most consistent and inevitable result of our lives: error. In those slight hiccups the purest moments of our existence occur.
Bonaventure has wabi-sabi. Bonaventure has a knack for celebrating the slightly off, quite messy and misunderstood; like the frozen geyser of water that remains on the tip of the lion’s tongue outside De La Roche all winter, like the garbage and empty racks of beer that pile up in the corner of my living room, like Clare College. No one in our Western world encounters the median of the strange Venn Diagram that joins imperfection and humility like Bonnies do.
Nicholas Coyne is a contributing writer for The Bona
Venture. His email is coynenm11@bonaventure.edu
