Wabi-Sabi Wasabi ... in Space!

As every knitter knows mistakes happen. Much of the joy that I get from knitting comes from the fact that a mistake only needs to be noticed to be corrected. It often happens that a mistake is not noticed until hours or even days of knitting will be lost in order to correct the mistake. I heard a Japanese phrase that allows me to leave some of these mistakes - Wabi-Sabi. Wabi Sabi is the Japanese aesthetic that true beauty is found in imperfection.

Wikipedia defines Wabi-Sabi as: (in Kanji: 侘寂) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centred on the acceptance of transience. The phrase comes from the two words wabi and sabi. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the Three marks of existence — Anicca, or in Japanese, 無常 (mujyou), impermanence.

I heard a story this morning about a Wasabi mishap on the International Space Station. Wasabi is a very spicy green horshradish used primarily in Japanese cooking. According to the AP this is how it happened:
The spicy greenish condiment was squirted out of a tube while astronaut Sunita Williams was trying to make a pretend sushi meal with bag-packaged salmon. The three space station crew members are given a certain number of bonus packs of their favorite foods to help endure their months in space where most meals are the equivalent of military MREs.
Since everything is weightless, spilled food is no ordinary clean-up challenge.
'We finally got the wasabi smell out after it was flying around everywhere,' Williams told her mother this week in a conversation arranged by Boston radio station WBZ. 'We cleaned it up off the walls a little bit.'

So next time you decide to frog back several day of knitting remember this: It sure beats scrubbing Wasabi off your walls! Or the next time you see a mistake and decide to let it go you can look at with a new perspective, and say proudly, "Wabi Sabi!"