Wabi Sabi: Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect, and therein lies its beauty.
An episode from a BBC radio series “The Death of Nuance” starts out with a list of “untranslatable” words, reminding me how much I love words from other languages with deep meanings lost in translation into English. I wrote a piece on this some time ago that pulls together links from many such pieces I’ve written. You can enjoy perusing them at: “Beautiful words bring dimensions of meaning“
One such word is “Wabi Sabi”, that I wrote of in “Funerals and Wabi-Sabi“, musing on one element of the meaning of the term, around the acceptance of life and death.
I love receiving weekly Sketchplanations emails, the latest one shown above, with a different thought around Wabi Sabi. The phrase “nothing is finished” resonates strongly for me.
I am a great believer in bringing diversity to what we focus on (as noted in my post from two days ago: “What do we see when we focus?“, and for me one of those areas of diversity of thought is around discovering and seeking to understand different cultures and beliefs through such wondrously deep words.
Oh, and my introduction to that BBC radio series and that particular episode came from a fellow participant in a recent session run by my friend and close colleague Alan Wick, who frequently talks about the word LOVE in the context of business. As a dialogue occurred in the chat around the lack of nuance in English around the word, I posted that, just as Scots have many words for rain and Inuits many words for snow, the ancient Greeks had many different words from love. I love these
- Eros: romantic, passionate love. …
- Philia: intimate, authentic friendship. …
- Ludus: playful, flirtatious love. …
- Storge: unconditional, familial love. …
- Philautia: self-love. …
- Pragma: committed, companionate love. …
- Agápe: empathetic, universal love.