Wabi-Sabi

I finished Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life over the weekend. Although it wasn't as comical as I thought it was going to be, it helped me to consider finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Also, something great happened. I found a word to describe how I've been feeling lately. Wabi-Sabi. Apparently, the author had been in search of this word too, and thankfully shared the word when she found it. She said she was looking for a word that meant "complete happiness and complete sadness simultaneously" where you feel "content, peaceful, hyper-aware of loss, in awe, perfectly, gently happy/sad" (205). She eventually found the word from 12th century Japanese history. Wabi-Sabi means "fusing two moods seamlessly; a sigh of slightly bittersweet contentment, awareness of transience of earthly things, and a resigned pleasure in simple things that bear the mark of that transience."

This is precisely the word I have been looking for. It's how I feel when I look at my newborn baby girl and am so in love with her big blue eyes, her round cheeks, and her pure spirit. I'm so perfectly happy with my child, yet I realize that this moment is incredibly fleeting, and that she will too soon grow out of this newborn stage, and eventually it will just be a memory that I will be desperately trying to cling to. Because of the "transience of earthly things" it makes this perfect moment of joy also a perfect moment of sadness/awareness that this too will pass as quickly as it came.

This is also the feeling Sayuri would often get in Memoirs of a Geisha and goes back to the discussion of the purpose of a fleeting life mentioned in my earlier posts.