CONTEXT

I didn't really have any idea what I was getting myself into. I started considering a solo trip to Japan for cherry blossom season around April of 2025. It was always just a "that would be a fun thing to do someday" type of thought. It wasn't until January of 2026 that I felt a real desire to actually do it. January is when sabi started to present itself to me, and I think that's what pushed me into actually bringing the trip to life. I say sabi "presented itself to me" because I can't say for sure what it actually is at the current moment, or what it will become.

I'm trying to build a lifestyle brand, but I want everything to make sense now. How am I supposed to know what sabi will become when I don't know what it is today? In search of sabi, I ventured into Japan to find meaning. And back in the real world, I went to Japan to source products for sabi. My initial idea was a curated boutique showcasing what I believed embodied the concept. For those unfamiliar, sabi isn't a new idea — the Japanese words wabi and sabi go back roughly 1,200 years, and their meanings have shifted over time. There's no single agreed-upon definition for either, but sabi tends to gather around objects that embody imperfection and impermanence. That was the lens I went with. Everything I would carry in sabi should be selected for the way it embodies the idea.

Coming from a world of reason, data, rules, and structure, defining sabi has been a real challenge for me. It forces me to come to terms with the unknown. I like it when things make sense logically, and recently, not a lot has been making sense. That's how I landed in Japan. I knew I was going to take pictures of the cherry blossoms, I knew where I was staying, but I didn't know any of the in-between. Leading up to the trip, there had been so much change in my life that I didn't have the capacity to plan, and going solo meant I didn't have anyone else to fall back on. Every decision I made was mine. I spent a lot of time not knowing what I was going to do next, just wandering from one place to another. I think I learned a lot about myself in that wandering.

I keep losing the thread when I try to write about this, which is probably the point. I went to Japan in search of sabi, and it wasn't what I had been romanticizing.