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+Ten years ago tonight I was sitting at an Iraqi restaurant in Paris, eating the second of what I would still rank as one of the top five meals of my life. The next morning I was due to get on a plain at Charles De Gaulle and disappear into the Indian subcontinent. I recorded nothing of the day in my journal, there is an entry on this site but I haven't reread it because I have realized, then years later, it doesn't matter. That was the beginning of the journey, that meal is where, for me anyway, a trajectory began that is still taking shape, there was something in that meal, something about eating such amazing food from a country that the country I came from was about to actively invade and attempt to destroy, eating that meal that night was not an awakening so much as a realization that it is possible to avoid the politic of the world, to side step the divisions created by the power brokers and connect at human beings do, as they always have, by eating together, by talking, by drinking, by walking together down the street, by being human, because life is joy and wonder and love and food and drink and walking. Everything else is just the static background noise of existence. All the beliefs, all that religions all the politics, all the attempts to divide are doomed to fail because they fly in the face of the fundamental truth that everyone knows, no matter how hard we sometimes seek to avoid it -- existence is incalculably immense, the universe goes on forever and we are so small in it as to hardly be of it and yet here we are. Able to look around, to appreciate the lapp of the sea on the shore, the clatter of palm fonds, the whistle of wind in pines, the soft rain, the driving storm, the inhospital mountains that welcome us home anyway. I don't know why we're here and neither do you, let's have a meal, maybe a drink if you like and we'll be friends.
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+If you zoom out far enough pretty much everything looks absurd. It's a handy way to reduce stress. 
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+Suppose, however, that I don’t respect the source of the insult…under such circumstances, rather than feeling hurt by his insults, I should feel relieved: If HE disapproves of what I am doing, then what I am doing is doubtless the right thing to do…if I say anything at all in response to his insults, the most appropriate comment would be, ‘I’m relieved that you feel that way about me’.”
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+Wabi-Sabi has a many different aspects to it, many of which are deeply entwined in Japanese culture in ways that an outsider like me is unlikely to ever fully appreciate, but the description I encountered, which has stuck with me is the idea that Wabi-Sabi means "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."[^1]
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+This can be extended to the appreciation of things not only when they are in their prime, but when they are at the other end of their journey, the decay, the withering, the dying, like flowers in the vase slowly moving from bright to brown. In other words enjoying the full length of the journey, not just the beginning. 
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+[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
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+[^1]: from Richard R. Powell's book <cite>Wabi Sabi Simple</cite>.
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