Remodeling This Life

I don’t know quite when it started, but a family friend started saying “wabi-sabi” one summer here at the cottage.  It has become a mantra of sorts for this little cottage life.

What does it mean? Well, if you asked me, I would say it means beauty in imperfection and appreciation of nature.  You can read more about it here.

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature….It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all.

It has become a pretty popular term for us here, with family and friends. The cottage life seems to really revel in the imperfect and, of course, nature. We enjoy the great outdoors daily. There is a lot of imperfection, from sloping floors and crooked doorways to us totally and shockingly imperfect people who grace this summer home.

Wabi-sabi is all about embracing imperfection, enjoying nature, seeing the beauty in flaws. Whether it is serving dinner to guests on chipped plates or tripping over loose floor boards, that is life. Trying to be perfect and make the environment around you perfect is a losing battle. Enjoy the way a creaky door sounds, forgive mistakes and stop criticizing, take in the beauty of nature. Stand in the rain.

True beauty comes from small things, simple things, moments with family or friends where you love each other despite flaws, enjoy dinner on a time-worn table, and laugh that the door frames are crooked, all while rain is falling outside on a summer day. Those things are authentic. Beauty is all around if you open yourself up to seeing it.

Wabi-sabi.

This post was originally published at Life Nurturing Education and Renae was kind enough to offer it up for me to post here while I am out of town. Please check out her site and if you like what you see, subscribe to her feed

The beautiful houses in glossy pages of magazines urge me to decorate. Curtains hide a few cracks, but they don’t cover bare concrete floor or holes in the wall. Our 1950s fixer-upper does not resemble Better Homes and Gardens or Pottery Barn. I am learning to accept it. Houses are just sticks and bricks embellished with fabric. Homes are made of something else entirely.

Home reminds me of frosting Christmas cookies with Mom, learning about car engines from Dad, and laughing during games of Monopoly with my brother. Love shines brightly even in misty memories of hateful words and wounded hearts. In family, hope endures and forgiveness stretches to cover most transgressions. These relationships forge early ideas of love for good or bad.

My children’s concept of home is forming in their hearts now. What am I communicating to them? That we live in a “fixer-upper full of roaches” as my son’s parody of Madeline stated, or that this is a place for us to live in peace creating sweet memories.

More than a remodeled kitchen, I want laughter to resound off the walls.

More than pristine flooring, I want peace to reign.

More than new furniture, I want love to engulf us.

Our house is far from finished, but our home is quite comfortable.

Hey all! I am barely here at my own blog in real time at the moment and have guest posts running but I found time to squeeze in a guest post of my own while my buddy Alison is on vacation too. So head on over to This Wasn’t In The Plan and check out my post that is up over there today. You can read about My Life, Not According To The Plan.

Last night, hubby and I sat down outside and were having one of those reminiscing conversations. We talked about where we’ve been in the 11 years we’ve been together and all the different things that we’ve gone through. We’ve lived in 4 different cities, spent time where both of us worked, neither of us worked and just one of us worked - me for a while when he stayed home with our newborn daughter and then he went back to work so I could stay home with her.

Our financial situation has changed in the direction of making less as the years have gone on. It seems to be the norm in life that people want to continue to make more money as time goes on. Most people can look back on 10 years ago and laugh at how little they were making then. We can look back on 10 years ago and the money we were making was twice as much more, but oh my was the lifestyle that went with it not a fun one to uphold - and oddly enough, we have better financial security with more money in the bank now than we ever did before. We’ve learned through the years that it’s not always about making more but being wise with what we do have and holding onto it. I’ve also come to realize that by learning to live well on less, we’re giving what we do have saved more power, we’re ensuring that it can last longer and take us further because we have learned to live on less.

That leads me to where we have ended up today. It has been and will continue to be an adventure, our life together. But one thing that I can safely say is that if we’ve learned and changed anything in the years we’ve been together it has been changing from a focus of making more more more to living well on less and making time for valuable things in life like time with family versus long hours working at the office or traveling for work.

I know there are all sorts of angles to take on money and how much one makes and whether it defines people or rules people. I think it is safe to say that there are a lot of people out there that continually want to make more money. When they do, their lifestyle shifts upwardly with it. Bigger house, new cars, more stuff. It’s how it’s done. Make more, spend more. That is the beauty of personal finance though - it’s personal and each person gets to do what works for them and makes them comfortable and happy - and live well on their terms.

Living well means different things to different people. For some people to feel they are living well, they need to have a $500 bottle of wine with dinner. For other people it’s their home that makes them feel they’ve “made it” and are living well. We all have different things that define that for us. I am trying to live a life in which living well is about things money can’t buy - being smart, athletic, artistic, creative, loving - spending time with my family, going for a run on a cool morning, enjoying my kids with ice cream smeared faces on a Saturday afternoon. I want to always remember that for myself, living well doesn’t have to mean living expensively.

I have been cooped up inside for far too long so the kids and I went and did a couple errands yesterday. We ended at Starbucks where I used the last of my gift card. Sad sad day. I have to start paying for my own lattes again. I was standing at the register, bought the kids their respective organic milk in a box for a ridiculous price and ordered my vanilla latte and handed the cashier my reusable mug to put it in. The kids were being silly and my daughter had run off to the big chairs where we sit when we go in. I called to her to come back and please carry their milks to the table.

I had to pay a little extra on top of the remaining balance of the gift card so I handed the cashier a $10 bill. I was distracted by the kids, but not enough so that when he said “your change is $7.06″ and I looked down to put it in my wallet and was putting a quarter and a penny in my wallet instead of a nickel and a penny in my wallet. So I simply handed the quarter back to him, told him he gave me too much change and asked for a nickel. No big deal, it’s 20 cents but I noticed so I wasn’t just going to walk away and pocket money that wasn’t mine.

I turned around, baby boy on my hip, latte in my hand, blueberry coffecake in the other, and a woman I guess about my age sees me and says “Are you for real?” I looked at her and smiled, unsure of what she meant or why she said it. Then she said further, “You’re so together. You have two kids but are so calm. You’re prepared with your reusable mug, and you just returned money when you were given too much change. There aren’t a lot of people like you in the world.”

I don’t know that that is true. It’s not like I did something huge. I just pay attention to the small things, not just the big things. There are a lot of real people out there just like me doing little things in this world. And there are a lot of people out there doing a lot lot bigger things than I do.

It’s not often a stranger takes the time to stop and make another person feel good though. So she may have thought I was special for trying to make a difference in my small way, but I think she was special for saying something. Imagine if we all just decided once a day to stop and say something wonderful about someone we come across instead of just thinking it. Make someone’s day. It’s a small way to make a big difference in the world.