The necessity of lifelong study. . .

So I’ve been studying the Japanese language in a fairly serious manner for 4 or 5 years now, and I’m not terrible at it, but I’m not great at it either. I probably wouldn’t embarrass you very badly if we were walking around in Japan together. I also probably wouldn’t leave people thinking that I was incredibly gifted at the language, but that’s ok. I embarrass myself in English on a fairly regular basis, and that doesn’t bother me at all.

But, with some realizations that I’ve had today, that I’ve had bubbling in my brain for a while, now that I think about it, I think the definition of wabisabi is incomplete. My understanding of it is certainly incomplete, but I don’t know if my current thoughts about the philosophy are themselves incomplete or if the philosophy itself is a bit incomplete.

There is not only strength and beauty that can be gained or perceived in imperfection, but also hilarity.

And while that can certainly be considered both a type of strength and a type of beauty, my thoughts at the moment are that it might be beneficial to think of it more as its own thing for this conversation.

I’ve had a really nice day, a really productive day, and just a really enjoyable day in a lot of ways. And I definitely wasn’t going to wait until 11:30 to do my daily blog post. And as the day went on, more and more things, which were all good, distracted me and helped me not notice that I haven’t developed a really solid system or schedule for doing this yet.

And I’ve spent this entire week so far talking to students about the benefit of writing every day, and having a daily writing practice, etc.

I got so comfortable talking about it like I had mastered that idea, that I almost relaxed enough to miss a day’s practice for no reason at all.

If you have never realized a similar type of idiocy in yourself, well, I am glad that you are enjoying your life, but if you pay close enough attention, I think this is a thing that all of us have done to some extent at some point.

And I think that is hilarious.

I am going to dwell on this for a while before I make a decision, but perhaps the shugyosha realization that I need to explore is that imperfection can be funny as hell.