Inside the Wabi-Sabi Mind

Welcome to the Neurochristi Martian. Inside the Wabi Savi Mind is our topic today, a reflection on imperfection, impermanence and the cultivated mind. Every age has its own quiet obsession. There was a time when people prayed simply for rain, for harvest, for children who survived infancy, for families that stayed safe through another winter. Their anxieties were immediate and visible, ours are strangely different. We measure our sleep before we ask whether we feel rested. Our watches congratulated us for 10,000 steps while quietly reminding us that yesterday we managed only 8. Modern media shows us lives edited into permanent holiday, permanent smile, permanent ascent. Artificial intelligence promises to make us more productive, more efficient, more organised. Bookshops overflow with promises of becoming better, stronger, richer, happier versions of ourselves. Without quite noticing it, we have begun to treat ourselves as projects for ever-awaiting improvement. It is an extraordinary way to live and an exhausting one. If perfection becomes the destination, every wrinkle becomes a reminder of youth lost. Every mistake, another personal failure, every disappointment, evidence that we have somehow fallen short of the lives we were meant to live. As a neuropsychiatrist, I have never found life to work quite like that. Illness has a way of rearranging our certainties. A stroke leaves behind an altered hand, but often reveals extraordinary resilience. Parkinson's disease slows the body while deepening patience. Depression teaches us how invisible suffering can become. The dementia slowly erodes memory, yet somehow leaves love, music and tenderness intact. The longer I have worked, the less interested I have become in perfect lives. The more interested I have become in fully human ones. Many years ago, during a period of real adversity, I began each working day with four simple words, words that were almost just expelled as breath, strength, courage, wisdom and fortitude. For the four words, I used to ask every day as I left home. Looking back, I realised I was not asking life to change, I was asking my mind too. Only much later did I discover that another culture, thousands of miles away, had been asking remarkably similar questions for centuries, not through prayer, but through gardens. And this brings me to the cultivated mind. The first Zen garden I encountered was almost disappointing. No spectacular flowers, no fountains, no dramatic colour, only stone, gravel, a few carefully placed rocks and empty space. At first glance, it seemed unfinished. Then I noticed something else. Someone had been there before me. The gravel had been freshly rigged, the leaves quietly removed, every stone placed exactly where it belonged. Nothing demanded attention, and yet everything invited it. The beauty of the garden did not lie in what had been created. It lay in what had been cultivated. The gardener would return tomorrow morning, not because today's garden had failed, but because tending the garden was itself the practice. And around the same time, I encountered a Japanese idea that has stayed with me ever since Wabi Sabi. It's often translated as the appreciation of imperfectional, impermanence and incompleteness. The translation is accurate, but it somehow misses a point. Wabi Sabi is not really asking us to admire cracked tea bowls or weathered limba. It is asking us to become comfortable with reality itself. Reality is unfinished, relationships evolve, bodies age, children leave home, parents become dependent, dreams change, plans unravel, nothing remains exactly as it was. Perhaps our suffering comes not because life changes, but because we quietly expect it not to. Let me repeat that for you to sit with. Even psychotherapy I found has arrived at much the same place by a different road. Acceptance and commitment therapy asks us to stop fighting thoughts that simply cannot be erased. Mindfulness teaches us to observe experience before reacting to it. Self-compassion reminds us to treat ourselves with the kindness we so easily extend to others. In languages, different cultures all gently suggesting the same possibility that flourishing may begin not when we have become perfect, but when we stop demanding perfection of ourselves. Again, let me repeat it so that you sit with it. Our flourishing may begin not when we become perfect, but when we stop demanding perfection of ourselves. The Zen Gardener understands something that the rest of us easily forget. The purpose of tending the garden is not to create a perfect landscape. It is to cultivate the Gardener. Perhaps the same is true of the human mind. Our brains are given to us, an act of nature, of God if you will, our minds are cultivated. One of the quite pleasures of medicine is that it teaches you to see familiar things differently. Two people stand before the same sunset. One admires its colors. Another remembers someone they once loved. A third reaches for a camera. A poet searches for words. A child simply laughs. The sunsets has not changed, yet each person inhabits a different world. We often speak as though the brain were a machine for storing information. Something I don't believe. The brain is not merely interested in information. It's constantly asking another question. What matters? Most of today's experiences will quietly disappear before the week is over. A few will accompany us for the rest of our lives. A family of fragrance. The sound of rain on an old-tiled roof. A sentence spoken by a teacher. A melody that somehow survives 50 years when yesterday's breakfast has already been forgotten. Memory I have come to realize is less about storage than significance. Ordinary neurologist eventually encounters people whose relationship with meaning seems unusually intense. They write endlessly. Conversations wander but refuse to end. Ordinary events acquire extraordinary significance. Religion, philosophy, ethics and literature become less like interests and more like places in which they live. You probably guess where I'm going with this. Half a century ago, the neurologist Norman Geshman recognized that these traits often travel together, particularly in some people living with temporal lobe epilepsy, a cluster now known after him as the Geshmans in Rome. Medicine quite rightly described them as symptoms, and for many people they were distressing enough to require treatment. Yet, sitting with patients over the years, I found another question quietly emerging. Not instead of the medical one, but alongside it. What must it be like to inhabit such a world, a world in which memories cling more tightly? Ideas refuse to leave. Several moments feel unexpectedly profound, where meaning itself seems amplified. That question changed something in my own practice. Diagnosis explains something important, but never everything that matters. A scan may show us where the brain has changed. For example, in temporal lobe epilepsy, it might show a scar in the temporal lobe. It cannot however tell us how the world now feels to the person. sitting opposite us. And this is perhaps where Vabi Sabhi quietly enters the consulting room, not as another therapeutic technique, not as an explanation, but as a way of looking. It asks us to notice the whole vessel before we become preoccupied by the crack. And perhaps that is true not only of illness, it is true of every human being, we shall ever meet. So when we go back to the person with Keshewind Syndrome, with hyper-religiosity, hyper-graphia, emotional viscosity, these are symptoms we describe, but look at the Vabi Sabhi in them. Think about how it must be to live inside such a world. There is a sentence that appears in different languages and different centuries across many wisdom traditions, this too shall pass. It sounds almost trivial until life begins to unravel. When we are anxious, we imagine we shall always feel this way. When we are grieving, it becomes difficult to remember joy. When we are happy, we quietly imagine the moment will somehow last forever. The mind has a curious habit of treating every passing experience as though it were permanent. Perhaps that is why so much of our suffering comes not from what happens to us, but from our struggle against what has already happened. We resist growing older, we resist disappointment, uncertainty, loss, sometimes we even resist ourselves. I mentioned that three different therapies, acceptance-based work, mindfulness, self-compassion, all seem to be converging on a single idea. What they are really describing is this, healing rarely begins by persuading people to think differently. It begins when they stop fighting reality. Acceptance is often misunderstood. People imagine it means giving up. It means almost the opposite. Acceptance simply means beginning from where life actually is, rather than where we wish it had been. A person recovering from a stroke cannot begin rehabilitation by pretending nothing has happened. If begins to soften, not when we forget the person we loved, but when we slowly learn to carry their absence differently. Reality is always the starting point, never the enemy. Perhaps this is where Wabi Sabi reveals its deepest psychological insight. It asks us to stop dividing life into the acceptable and unacceptable, the beautiful and the broken, the successful and the failed. So again, let me just repeat the Wabi, Sabi, psychological insight. Instead, it gently reminds us that all living things are unfinished. We are unfinished. Our relationships are unfinished. When the person we become tomorrow will not be the person we are today. Seeing this way, acceptance is no longer passive. It becomes an act of courage. The courage to remain present when life refuses to follow our plans. The courage to begin again, without pretending, we are beginning from the same place. Remember those four words I once clung to each morning in a difficult season of my own. In the blink of the blink, courage, wisdom, fortitude. Looking back, I realize there was a fifth quality hiding quietly among all of them, acceptance. Not acceptance as surrender. Acceptance as the willingness to stand where I was, see clearly and take the next step. And perhaps that is what the Zen Gardener understands. He never argues with yesterday's wind. He simply picks up the rake and begins again. Every clinician learns this eventually. No life remains unbroken. Some fractures announce themselves dramatically, a stroke, a diagnosis of cancer, the sudden loss of someone we love. Doctors arrive more quietly, a marriage that slowly comes apart, a carrier that never became what we hoped, a childhood that leaves invisible scars. The slow recognition that the person we imagined becoming will never quite exist. From a distance, these lives appear ordinary. Only when people begin telling their stories, we realize how many fractures they have learned to carry. One has traditionally been fascinated by repair, restore movement, restore memory, restore speech, restore health and rightly so. Yet over the years I have found myself drawn to another question. Not simply can we restore what was, but what becomes possible now. There is a Japanese art known as Kinsugi. When a treasured bowl breaks, it is not discarded nor are the cracks hidden. The fragments are patiently brought together using lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The fracture remains visible. Indeed it becomes the most beautiful part of the vessel. It is a lovely image, but I have often wondered whether we misunderstand it. Kinsugi is not celebrating brokenness. No one wishes for the bowl to break. It is celebrating something far more hopeful that healing need not erase history. The bowl does not become beautiful because it broke. It becomes beautiful because someone took the trouble to mend it. That distinction matters and in the consulting room I have seen it a countless times. The young woman who discovers compassion after living through depression. The family who grow closer after caring for a parent with dementia. The executive who after burnout finally begins living a life that feels like his own. The stroke survivor who walks more slowly than before, but notices the world more deeply. None of them would choose the suffering they endured. Nor should they. Yet many discover that healing is not a return to yesterday. It is the quiet construction of a tomorrow. Let me repeat that for you so you sit with it. Many discover that healing is not a return to yesterday. It is the quiet construction of tomorrow. Modern neuroscience offers an interesting parallel. The brain rarely heals by simply replacing what has been lost. It reorganizes, neighbouring networks assume new roles. Fresh pathways emerge. Recovery is seldom restoration. It is adaptation. Perhaps neuroplasticity is the brain's own form of Kinsugi. Not the disappearance of the crack, but the patient integration of it into a new hole. As I look back over the thousands of people that I have met, the most remarkable among them are rarely those who escaped suffering. They are those who learnt not to let suffering become the whole story. The cracks remain, so do the memories, so does grief. But something else quietly appears between them - perspective, compassion, humility, wisdom. Not despite the fracture, through the work of repair. Wabi Sabhi teaches us that life will never remain untouched. Kinsugi reminds us that neither shall we, and yet both leave us with the same gentle hope that a life need not become perfect to become beautiful. It need only remain open to being patiently, lovingly, and honestly repaired. One of the curious assumptions of modern life is that there is a correct way to be human. We admire the confident, the outgoing, the productive, the endlessly sociable. Without quite intending to, we create an invisible template of the ideal person. Those who resemble it are called successful. Those who do not often spend a lifetime wondering what is wrong with them. Yet the longer I have worked, the more that template has begun to dissolve. Some of the most compassionate people I have known have carried deep emotional wounds of their own. Some of the most creative minds have have struggled with conventions, others navigate effortlessly. Some people find meaning in solitude, others in community. Some flourish in structure, others in spontaneity. There are people who remember every conversation they have ever had. And others who cannot remember what they had for breakfast yet never forget a kindness. Who decided that only one of these ways of being was normal? Medicine itself has grown humbler over the years. When I began training, many differences were quickly described as deficits. Today, we increasingly speak of neurodiversity, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, to its syndrome. Different patterns of attention. Different ways of learning, different ways of relating to the world. Difference is not always deficiency, nor does every difference a gift. Most are simple variations on the extraordinary theme of being human. The same I think is true far beyond medicine. The Japanese speak of Wabi Sabi. As Scandinavians speak of lagam, not too much, not too little. In India, we smile knowingly at jugadh. The curious ability to create possibility from limitation. In southern Africa, Ubuntu reminds us that a person becomes fully human only through other people. Our own traditions in the Indic world speak of vanaprastha, a stage of life in which ambition gradually gives way to reflection. Different cultures, different languages, each quietly cultivating a particular quality of mind, acceptance, balance, resourcefulness, belonging, wisdom. It is the same four words I found myself returning to years ago in my own difficult season. One culture's particular vocabulary for cultivating a mind. Not an instruction for changing the world, but a discipline for inhabiting it. Perhaps civilization itself is less a collection of monuments than a collection of cultivated dispositions. A clinician speaks of resilience, a monk speaks of awareness, a samurai, warrior speaks of courage, a psychologist speaks of acceptance. The words are different. The cultivation is the same. And perhaps that is the quite lesson all these traditions have been trying to teach us. Human flourishing has never depended on becoming the same. It is dependent on each of us learning how to cultivate the particular mind we have been given. As this journey comes to an end, I find myself thinking less about Japan than about people. The elderly gentleman learning to walk again after a stroke. The young woman slowly rediscovering herself after depression. The child with autism teaching his parents an entirely different way of seeing the world. The family caring for a parent whose memories have begun to fade. The executive recovering from a burnout. The artist whose sensitivity is both a gift and a burden. The person living with epilepsy who discovers that a diagnosis explains something important, but never everything that matters. No two of these journeys are ever quite the same. Nor should they be. We often speak as though flourishing were a destination, waiting somewhere beyond perfection. Life has taught me something rather different. Flourishing is not the absence of cracks. It is the quite cultivation of a life that remains open to growth despite them. Let me repeat that for you once again, just for you to sit with it. Perhaps that is why Wabi Sabhi has stayed with me. Not because it teaches us to admire imperfection, but because it reminds us that imperfection was never the opposite of being human. It was the condition of being human all along. Every morning the Zen Gardener returns. The wind has disturbed yesterday's careful lines. Leaves have fallen. Rain has altered the gravel. Nothing remains exactly as he left it, yet he never appears disappointed. He simply kneels, picks up the rake and begins again. I have often wondered whether all the great wisdom traditions are quietly teaching the same lesson. The samurai cultivates courage; the monk cultivates awareness; the physician cultivates compassion; the therapist cultivates acceptance; the teacher cultivates curiosity; the elder cultivates wisdom; the words differ; the practice remains remarkably similar; each invites us to tend something within ourselves that no one else can cultivate on our behalf. I told you about those four simple words that came to me during a difficult period in my own life; strength, courage, wisdom, fortitude. At the time I thought I was praying for the strength to face the world. Looking back, I wonder whether I was really learning to cultivate the garden. Not a garden of stone and gravel, but a garden of mind. Perhaps that is the real gift of Wabi Sabhi. Not an aesthetic, not even a philosophy and invitation. To become less preoccupied with becoming perfect, a little more patient with ourselves, a little more generous towards others, a little more willing to see the whole vessel before we notice the crack. The brain, after all, is a remarkable gift of biology. It allows us to remember to imagine, to create, to love, to suffer, to make meaning. But what we do with that gift, that is the work of a lifetime. The brain is given to us, the mind is cultivated, and perhaps flourishing begins not when we finally become the people we imagined we ought to be, but we quietly begin tending the people we already are. Take the Zen Gardener, returning each morning, knowing the garden will never be finished, yet finding in the tending itself a life of extraordinary beauty. Thank you for joining me on this Neurochristian Martian. Until we meet again, take care of your brain, your body and your mind, and take care too of the garden you return to each morning. 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