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By: C. de Castro  A pianist plays a note that wasn’t from the sheet music. Then another, then another, until a melody unfolds. The pianist did not intend to play the wrong note, but from it, she created a wonderful piece of improvisation.
This was not planned, and yet it is still considered art, but how can something so unplanned still be so beautiful? Art originated from improvisation, but these days we normally think beauty comes from precision. On social media we observe everyone’s perfect plans, perfect grades, perfect life, and we start to think perfection is the bare minimum. We often assume beauty requires a blueprint. We believe the most valuable things are carefully designed and perfectly executed. Improvisation challenges that assumption. When a pianist is improvising, they don’t know every note beforehand. Mistakes can sometimes happen, but a beautiful song can emerge from those mistakes. Writing is a lot like improvisation; for me, it takes a lot of planning to write the first few sentences, then I enter a trance, and the words flow out of my brain and onto the paper. When shopping for small trinkets to add to your collection, you don’t look for the most perfect, shiniest teapot; you look for the one that looks as if it has lived a life before finding your hand, the one that looks as if it could have belonged to Dostoyevsky, or the one that could have been Jane Austin’s pen pot, and usually that pot is the one with the most imperfections: cracks, dents or chips. What I’m trying to say is that you do not need to be perfect to be beautiful; some of the most beautiful and famous art pieces (like the Mona Lisa) were not perfect. Their imperfections make them stand out even more.
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By: M. Tastardi  Practically speaking, there is almost no reason to listen to a vinyl record anymore. Spotify gives you millions of songs instantly; you don't have to flip anything over, and there is no dust getting in the way of the music. Yet vinyl is everywhere again. And somehow, the little crackles and pops that would technically make the sound “worse” are part of why people like it.
The same thing is happening with cameras. We have phones that can take ridiculously clear photos, automatically fix the lighting and focus, and let us take the same picture twenty times until we get one we like. And what do we do? Buy old digital cameras that make photos grainy, slightly blurry, and weirdly colored. Film makes even less sense. You only get a limited number of photos; you can't check them after taking them, and you must wait for them to be developed. Sometimes you wait all that time just to find out that half of them are terrible. But that's also kind of the point. Maybe we have made things so perfect that perfect has become a little boring. There is something different about a photo you couldn't retake fifty times or a record where you can sometimes practically hear the dust sitting on it. They feel less edited and a bit more real. None of this means we're about to give up Spotify or start carrying film cameras everywhere. Convenience is convenient for a reason. But it is interesting that, after spending years trying to get rid of grain, scratches, blur, and waiting, we're now choosing to bring some of them back. By: S. Dias  If you've spent any time looking through decoration or design books in the last decade, you've probably run into wabi-sabi, usually attached to a photo of a rustic ceramic mug or a minimalist living room with exposed wood. You might’ve also heard the term on TikTok, where an audio from King of the Hill of a young boy saying, “but I like how mine’s a little off-centre; it’s got Wabi Sabi” went viral. It gets marketed as a lifestyle philosophy, a kind of antidote to modern-day perfectionism emphasized by social media. Embrace the crack in the vase. Love your wrinkles. Stop chasing flawless. That's a fine enough message, but it's also a fairly recent, fairly Western repackaging of a term with a much older and stranger backstory, one that actually started as two separate, mostly negative words.
Wabi and Sabi didn't begin their lives together, and they definitely didn't begin as compliments. Wabi originally pointed to the loneliness of living in nature, away from society, and carried overtones of poverty and desolation. For example, a hermit leaving behind the wealth and social life of the capital – Kyoto in old Japan – to live a hard, lonely life in the mountains. Sabi, meanwhile, referred to the withering or fading that comes with age, the idea of something growing rusty, worn down, or old. Neither word was originally about beauty at all. If anything, they described the kind of quiet sadness you'd want to avoid. The shift began through poetry in medieval Japan. Waka and later haiku poets, working within the aesthetic influence of Buddhism, started finding something worth dwelling on in that loneliness and decay. A famous example is the poet Fujiwara no Teika, whose verses explored bleak, muted landscapes, rather than a spring garden in full bloom. Zen Buddhism provided the philosophical foundation for this shift, especially its emphasis on impermanence, the idea that all things are transient and that clinging to permanence only causes suffering. Once you accept that nothing lasts, a fading flower stops being merely sad. Age and imperfection become an honest reflection of how the world actually works. Japanese culture started embracing imperfection as we understand it today through the tea ceremony, chanoyu, particularly the tradition shaped by the sixteenth century tea master Sen no Rikyu. Rikyu inherited an earlier movement started by figures like Murata Juko and Takeno Joo, who had begun rejecting the lavish, imported Chinese ceramics that wealthy tea gatherings once valued over rougher and simpler pieces made locally in Japan. Rikyu emphasized this more than anyone. He preferred bowls with asymmetrical shapes and visible imperfections over the polished symmetry that had previously indicated wealth and taste. Interestingly, the compound term 'wabi-sabi' as a fixed philosophical concept doesn't actually show up clearly in historical Japanese texts the way people often assume. Scholars have pointed out that the phrase was rarely used as a single unified idea until the twentieth century, when Japanese aesthetics were being re-examined, partly for a Japanese audience navigating modernization and partly for curious outsiders discovering Japanese art and design. Writers and critics essentially fused the two older, separate concepts into one accessible term, giving Western audiences in particular a label for a cluster of ideas that had previously lived scattered across poetry, tea ceremony, and Zen thought. That history matters because it complicates the tidy modern version of wabi-sabi as simply celebrating flaws for their own sake. The original spirit wasn't about decorating your apartment with distressed furniture. It was about accepting loneliness, decay, and impermanence to find something quietly moving in them, instead of rejecting them. A cracked bowl was never meant to be a trendy aesthetic choice, but a reminder that everything ages, everything fades, and that this isn't a tragedy so much as the basic condition of being alive. By: I. Tamagusuku “Perfect people aren’t real, and real people aren’t perfect”, at some point of our lives we all hear a phrase like this one, and it makes us wonder, why could we humans never be perfect?
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