Limpid Dewdrops

Mono no aware. The pathos of things. The poignancy of the awareness of the impermanence of every thing in the world.

The mono no aware is the Japanese aesthetic perspective that the sadness of transience is beautiful.

Scholars exemplify this with iconic examples: the last sliver of the waning moon; the last burst of summer; a flower in its fullest bloom. Zen examples make more sense: a dewdrop on a leaf, a rose and a horse by the roadside, a snowflake on an open palm, the stillness of an old pond. These images evoke a sensitivity towards a criterion of beauty—what makes something beautiful is not what already is; what makes something beautiful is the awareness that it doesn’t last.

Thus, in this perspective, the snowflake, the dewdrop and the still pond are beautiful because of their fleeting existence. A rose in full bloom is beautiful only because it wilts after that period of beauty. A dewdrop is a marvelous thing to behold only because it could roll to the ground without warning and disappear in an instant. The beauty of the stillness of the pond lies in the apprehension of it being disturbed, perhaps, by Basho’s wayward frog.

Transience. Sadness. Beauty.

I see it in the excited chatter of students, sudden and wonder-ful, when an idea—irrelevant until then—suddenly becomes the most important discovery of the day.

It is there, and everywhere else—

In the awareness of a pride that cannot be contained by the world for a class one mentors;

In the smile that steals into the eyes of a parent who has been tired for too long;

In the ridiculous affairs of a younger brother, or in the fierce passion of a younger sister’s dreaming;

In the lighting up of a child’s eyes at the arrival of an adult friend, making the latter wonder if it isn’t undeserved;

In the carefree laughter shared only among true friends, the rolling kind that renders one breathless;

It is there, especially in the silence that sits between two memories—the previous memory for which the laughter was, and the next one, still being sifted through for, in the minds of old friends who sit together, just for reminiscing. It is there in the quiet that lingers when they say goodbye, before they send each other off with silly jokes that speak what they do not say.

It never gets old. Each time I am confronted by the aware, I am struck by the same sense of discovery that washed over me nine years ago, as I sat in my AsianLit class, and a haiku suddenly made sense, opening to me a worldview that was as powerful as it is honest and beautiful.

Oh white, limpid dew

With what poor judgment you choose

The place where you lie.

Limpid dewdrops, we might all be. And are we not all placed in the midst of great uncertainty, at times rolling to the ground before we are ready, and at times, lingering long enough to catch a ray of light, and lending a tiny burst of colors to the world around us?

Mono no aware. It is the uncertainty—the gray—that makes that tiny burst of colors, and everything else, precious.