Closer to The Heart of "Perfection"

Wabi-sabi has been on my mind lately, but not in the way it used to be. It feels less like a philosophy I understand and more like something I am beginning to recognize.

On the March Release Day LIVE, I found myself speaking in a way I hadn’t planned.

I was talking about the world, or maybe more accurately, about my unease with it. I didn’t name anything directly, but there was a thread running underneath. That sense that so much feels out of our control, and that the only place we can reliably stand is in how we choose to move through it.

Kindness kept coming up for me as the one thing that didn’t seem to shift.

Afterwards, some of my team mentioned that I may have drifted too far from clothing.

They weren’t wrong.

Last week’s blog was my attempt to acknowledge that. It felt important to say that I might have been speaking to people who didn’t need to hear it, or at least didn’t in that moment.

What came back surprised me.

There were messages, comments, small responses that stayed with me more than I expected. It’s difficult to describe without making it sound more dramatic than it was, but they lingered, even into my sleep.

I’ve been having versions of the same dream for years. The setting is almost always a high school I don’t recognize. Usually, I exist somewhere along the edges. Present, but not quite inside. 

After last Friday’s blog, I had the dream again, but something was different.

I was inside the school. Not as a visitor, but as someone who belonged there. I was working with other people, moving towards something shared. There was no sense of monitoring myself, no calculation of how much space I was taking up. I felt like part of a team. Like “self” was a construct.

I am increasingly comfortable with the idea that I am “imperfect.”. My internal framework for moving through life has become quite simple: keep my side of the street clean, and when something presents itself as a lesson, learn and grow as required.

What I don’t think I had honestly reconciled is the other half, the “perfectly” part of “perfectly imperfect.”

Perfection not as something fixed, but as something that keeps unfolding. The same idea returning, slightly altered depending on where I am when I meet it.

To be inconsistent, to revisit the same thought more than once, to think you’ve understood something and then realize there is more underneath it. To show up as slightly different versions of yourself over time, each one feeling, in the moment, like the final version.

I think that might be part of why the Wabi-Sabi or “Perfectly Imperfect” collection at sariKNOTsari resonates for me at increasingly deeper levels.

These pieces carry visible histories. Marks, irregularities, places where the fabric has lived another life before this one. None of that is hidden. It isn’t corrected or disguised. It is simply there, and the garment continues anyway.

I used to think that the appeal was in the idea itself, in the reframing of imperfection as something worth keeping. “Perfect Imperfection” made practical sense to me.

Lately, it has felt more like recognition.

I was speaking with my cousin recently about how learning doesn’t conclude. There’s an assumption that once something is understood, it can be set aside as complete. But growth doesn’t seem to behave that way. The same idea can return, unchanged on the surface, but experienced differently depending on where you are when it finds you again.

“Perfectly imperfect” is not a new concept to me. I have heard it, understood it, even agreed with it for years.

But it feels different now.

Not because the idea has changed, but because something in me has shifted enough to feel it rather than just recognize it.

It feels less like a philosophy now, and more like recognition.