Wabi-Sabi Meaning: The Japanese Philosophy of Imperfect Beauty Explained

The Crawling Door

In 1582, on a hillside at the edge of what is now Kyoto's western suburbs, a merchant's son named Sen no Rikyū finished building the smallest architecturally significant structure in Japanese history. The Taian (待庵) tea room measures just two tatami mats — roughly 3.3 square meters. Its ceiling is low enough to make tall guests stoop. Its walls are rough clay, deliberately unfinished. Its pillars are knotted bamboo, not the lacquered wood the powerful preferred. But the most radical feature is its door.

The nijiriguchi (躙nijiri口guchi), which translates as "crawling entrance" or more literally "wriggling mouth," is a square opening cut into the wall approximately sixty centimeters on each side. To enter the Taian, every guest — samurai or merchant, daimyo or servant — must remove their weapons, bend at the waist, and crawl. There is no other way in.

This was not an accident of construction or a practical necessity. It was a philosophical argument made in timber and clay. Rikyu designed the door that way on purpose, and everyone who passed through it understood exactly what he meant: inside this room, hierarchy ends. Your sword stays outside. Your rank stays outside. What enters is only you.

The Taian still stands at Myōki-an temple in Yamazaki, Kyoto. It is now a National Treasure of Japan — the oldest surviving two-tatami tea room in existence, the oldest surviving room with a nijiriguchi. Scholars and designers travel from across the world to stand at that low doorway and try to understand what Rikyu was after. What they are trying to understand, really, is wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) — a concept that has become one of the most-cited, least-understood phrases in contemporary design discourse, and whose actual history is considerably stranger than the Instagram aesthetic that now bears its name.

The word itself has a complicated past. Wabi once meant something closer to "suffering from loneliness." Sabi once meant something that used to be nice but had deteriorated. They were not, for most of their histories, paired together — that pairing is largely a 20th-century construction, consolidated in the years around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo, when Japan was actively curating its cultural exports for international audiences. The ancient-sounding compound is, in a meaningful sense, newer than television.

None of this diminishes the concept. If anything, it clarifies what wabi-sabi actually is: not a fixed aesthetic category handed down unchanged from some primordial Japan, but a living, contested, occasionally paradoxical set of values that different people in different centuries have reached for when they wanted to say something important about impermanence, humility, and what it means to find beauty where others see only ruin. That is the story this article tells — and it begins, properly, with how ugly both words used to be.

Two Ugly Words: Wabi and Sabi Before They Were Beautiful

The 8th-century Japanese word wabi appears in the earliest court poetry of the Man'yōshū anthology, and it meant, essentially, romantic misery: the loneliness of longing for someone who was not present, the desolation of an unanswered love. It was not a compliment. To call a poem "wabi-like" was to say it captured a condition of emotional suffering, the particular ache of distance and loss.

Sabi had a parallel fate. Etymologically, the word is connected to the Japanese for rust — 錆 (sabi) — though the aesthetic sabi uses the character 寂, meaning "loneliness" or "stillness." The connection to rust is not incidental. The original aesthetic sense of sabi described something that had been beautiful once, was now worn and diminished, and could only remind you of its former better state. Again: not a compliment.

The transformation of both words from expressions of loss into expressions of aesthetic value happened gradually across the 14th through 16th centuries, driven by an increasing influence of Zen Buddhist thought on Japanese court culture. Zen offered a different way of encountering impermanence: not as tragedy but as the very texture of existence, not something to resist but something to inhabit completely. The Buddhist doctrine of mujō (無常) — impermanence — had long taught that clinging to permanence was itself the source of suffering. If you accepted impermanence, something strange happened: what had seemed like loss revealed itself as beauty.

"We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite."

— Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman

This shift was not purely philosophical — it was also social. Japan's medieval period brought a valorization of simplicity that was partly genuine spiritual practice and partly aristocratic performance. Nobles who could afford elaborate gold-threaded robes began, paradoxically, to prize plain undyed cloth. Patrons who had filled their teahouses with Chinese lacquerware began to find rough Japanese pottery more interesting. The ugliness of poverty began to be reread, by those who had never experienced poverty, as a kind of spiritual clarity.

This revaluation had a specific institutional home: the tea ceremony. And the tea ceremony had a specific architect of its wabi turn: a Zen monk named Murata Jukō, also written Shukō, who lived from roughly 1423 to 1502 and is sometimes called the "father of the Japanese tea ceremony." Jukō was the first to argue that tea-drinking could be a form of Zen practice — a path toward what he called the "Way of Tea" — and he did so by stripping away everything that separated it from contemplation. He replaced gold, jade, and porcelain utensils with simple wooden and clay instruments. He valued four principles: humble reverence (kin), respect (kei), purity (sei), and Buddhist calmness (jaku). He was, in a real sense, the first wabi-sabi practitioner, though the compound term itself was centuries away from being coined.

The philosophical roots of what Jukō was reaching for run deeper than Japan. Scholars trace the concept's origins to Taoism during China's Song Dynasty (960–1279), where appreciation of natural imperfection and ascetic simplicity was already a developed aesthetic position. The ideas traveled to Japan with Zen Buddhism, took hold in the tea ceremony, and then spent four centuries being refined, disputed, commodified, lost, rediscovered, and eventually globalized into the muted-earth-tones aesthetic that now sells handmade ceramics on Etsy.

One more thing about etymology: the compound "wabi-sabi" did not appear as a unified aesthetic term in any consistent way until the second half of the 20th century. Scholars who have combed through tea ceremony texts from the 17th century onward find that the two words were used separately, rarely together, and that during most of the Edo period (1603–1868), they barely appear at all. The dominant aesthetic of that era, in urban merchant culture, was iki and sui — a dandyish wit, an elegance of knowing sophistication. Wabi and sabi were, for much of Japan's cultural history, considered old-fashioned or simply irrelevant.

What we call the "traditional" Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is, in large part, a retroactive construction — assembled during the Meiji period's nation-building project, consolidated during postwar reconstruction, and polished to an international sheen just in time for the global stage of the 1964 Olympics. This does not mean the values are fake. It means they were chosen, curated, and insisted upon. That act of selection is itself a form of wabi-sabi: imperfect, incomplete, revised over time.

The Tea Master Who Died for Imperfection

By the time Sen no Rikyū reached his late fifties, he was the most influential figure in the world of Japanese tea. He had begun his career under Oda Nobunaga, one of the great unifiers of feudal Japan; after Nobunaga's assassination in 1582, Rikyū transferred his service to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who would complete the unification of the country and become its effective ruler. For a tea master, this was extraordinary proximity to absolute power. Rikyū used it, consistently, to argue for less.

He reduced the standard tea room from four-and-a-half tatami mats — the Jukō design — to two. He built the nijiriguchi. He insisted on rough-hewn bamboo pillars rather than lacquered wood, on clay walls rather than finished plaster, on dimly filtered natural light rather than the theatrical illumination that wealth preferred. He championed raku ware — hand-molded ceramic bowls made without a wheel, their asymmetry and irregularity the direct trace of the maker's hands — over the smooth, mass-produced Chinese porcelain that had been the prestige choice for a generation.

His most famous aesthetic gesture, recorded in various texts, was staged in a garden. A student had swept a leaf-strewn path to perfect cleanliness. Rikyū walked to a nearby tree and shook it, sending a scatter of leaves back across the swept ground. That, he said, is how a garden path should look. The natural world does not submit to human tidiness, and pretending it does is not cleanliness — it is denial.

"In the way of tea, the host and the guest should meet together in complete sincerity."

— Sen no Rikyū, attributed

But Rikyū's wabi conviction put him on a collision course with the man he served. Hideyoshi was a general who had risen from peasant origins through military genius to command the entire country. He loved magnificence. He had a portable tea room constructed of gold — gold walls, gold ceiling, gold utensils. Everything that Rikyū found spiritually empty, Hideyoshi found gratifying. The tea ceremony, for Hideyoshi, was an instrument of political theater, a way to display the breadth of his authority. For Rikyū, it was the one space where authority was supposed to disappear.

The rupture came in 1591. The official charges against Rikyū were elaborate and somewhat obscure: he had committed lese-majesty against both Hideyoshi and the emperor; he had placed a wooden statue of himself atop a gate at Daitokuji temple in Kyoto, forcing visitors to walk beneath his effigy; he had engaged in unreasonable commercial dealings in tea ceremony items. Historians have debated the real causes for four centuries without settling on a single explanation. What is agreed is that the underlying tension was aesthetic and political: Rikyū refused to treat the tea ceremony as a prop for power, and in refusing, he made himself dangerous.

On April 21, 1591, at the age of seventy, Rikyū was ordered to commit ritual suicide at his residence within Hideyoshi's Jurakudai palace. Before he died, he held one final tea ceremony. He served his guests with complete attention. When the ceremony was finished, he presented each piece of the tea equipment to his guests as a farewell gift — each piece, except the bowl. He looked at the bowl, said, "Never again shall this cup, polluted by the lips of misfortune, be used by man," and shattered it.

The gesture was pure wabi-sabi: the object's damage became its meaning; the breaking was the final ceremony; the act of destruction completed the lesson he had spent a lifetime teaching. Impermanence is not a problem to be solved. It is the medium in which beauty happens.

The Taian tea room at Myōki-an is the only physical structure he designed that survived him. It is roughly the size of a large bathroom. It has been standing for 440 years.

Kintsugi: When Breaking Is the Point

Sometime in the late 15th century, according to the most widely repeated version of the story, the eighth shogun of the Muromachi period, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl to China for repair. The bowl was a treasured piece; Yoshimasa wanted it restored. When it came back, it had been mended with metal staples — the standard Chinese repair technique of the era, functional and honest but, from an aesthetic standpoint, brutal. The staples held the bowl together in the most literal possible way and made it ugly in the most obvious possible way.

Yoshimasa disliked this. He gave the bowl to Japanese craftsmen and asked them to find something better. What they developed was kintsugi (金kin継ぎtsugi): the technique of mending broken ceramics with urushi lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The repair did not conceal the damage. It illuminated it. The crack became a vein of gold, the break became a seam of light, the wound became the most visually arresting part of the object.

Kintsugi is sometimes described as "making broken things beautiful," but this understates what it actually does. It does not make broken things beautiful despite their brokenness. It makes them beautiful because of it — because the history of damage is now visible, because the object carries the record of what happened to it, because time and accident are written into its surface in precious metal. The bowl that has been through kintsugi is not restored to what it was. It is transformed into something that could not have existed without the breaking.

The connection to wabi-sabi philosophy is not incidental — it is constitutive. Both kintsugi and wabi-sabi locate value in impermanence rather than despite it. Both treat the trace of time not as corruption but as enrichment. A tea bowl that has been kintsugi-repaired is, in the logic of this aesthetic, more valuable than an intact bowl, because it contains more time, more history, more of the honest texture of existence. It has lived.

The practice became so popular in 16th and 17th-century Japan that it generated its own perverse consequence. Collectors began deliberately smashing valuable pottery in order to have it repaired with gold seams. The logic had inverted: rather than transforming accidental damage into beauty, people were engineering damage specifically to achieve the aesthetic that damage could produce. Whether this represents a corruption of the philosophy or a fascinating extension of it — the intentional embrace of destruction as a form of creation — is a question Japanese aestheticians debated at the time and have never entirely resolved.

This paradox is deeply embedded in the kintsugi tradition's relationship to wabi-sabi: the moment a philosophy of accidental beauty becomes a deliberate style, something essential has shifted. But perhaps that shift is itself wabi-sabi — nothing is permanent, including the purity of an aesthetic ideal.

Today, kintsugi repair kits have become one of the fastest-growing categories in craft retail, available in multiple levels from beginner sets with practice bowls to professional kits using genuine urushi lacquer. The practice requires patience — traditional urushi cures over weeks, not hours — but has attracted a global following among people who find, in the act of golden repair, something the phrase "wabi-sabi" alone can no longer quite carry.

The related concept of mushin (無心, "no mind") runs through both kintsugi and wabi-sabi practice: a state of non-attachment, of encountering the object — broken or intact — without insisting it be otherwise than it is. This is the hardest part to learn, and no repair kit comes with instructions for it.

The Merchant Paradox: Who Actually Practiced Wabi-Sabi

In 16th-century Japan, the social order was rigid and officially immovable. At the top were the samurai, then the farmers, then the artisans, and at the bottom — despite their often extraordinary wealth — the merchants. Commerce was considered ignoble; those who profited from trade rather than production were viewed, in the Confucian framework that organized Japanese society, as essentially parasitic. Rich merchants could not attend the tea ceremonies that signaled elite status. They could not participate in the poetry gatherings. They could not sit in the rooms where power and culture were made.

So some of them did something interesting. They adopted wabi-sabi.

The historian and Japan scholar Professor Timon Screech of SOAS University of London has analyzed this phenomenon in ways that reframe the entire concept. Merchant-class adherents of the wabi aesthetic were not reaching for enlightenment, Screech argues. They were reaching for cultural legibility. The wabi retreat — the rough tea hut, the plain utensils, the deliberate rejection of luxury — was a performance of the kind of people who had a world of luxury to reject. You performed poverty to demonstrate that you had risen above the need for wealth. You performed simplicity to signal that you understood, at some deep level, that the finery you had supposedly transcended was beneath you anyway.

The problem, as Screech points out, is that the merchants doing this did not actually have a world of privilege to escape from. They were excluded from the elite world by law. Their wabi retreat was not a retreat from privilege; it was an imitation of what a retreat from privilege would look like, performed by people who had never had the privilege. It was aesthetic aspiration disguised as aesthetic renunciation.

This insight cuts to something important about wabi-sabi that most of its contemporary practitioners prefer not to linger on: the philosophy has never been purely philosophical. It has always been entangled with status, with who gets to define beauty, with what it costs to signal the right kind of simplicity. The rough tea bowl that Rikyū championed is, today, one of the most expensive objects you can buy in Japan. A genuine raku bowl by a recognized maker can cost tens of thousands of dollars. By achieving that monetary value, it loses the very quality — humble accessibility — that was supposed to make it meaningful.

The contemporary version of this paradox is visible in any design magazine: the "wabi-sabi bathroom" featuring hand-thrown ceramic fixtures at several thousand dollars each; the "wabi-sabi kitchen" with linen curtains from a Scandinavian lifestyle brand; the "wabi-sabi living room" assembled by an interior designer charging hundreds of dollars per hour to curate the appearance of thoughtless simplicity. The merchants of the Edo period would have recognized this immediately. They invented it.

None of this means that the wabi-sabi impulse is fraudulent. It means that the impulse is human — that the desire to find beauty in impermanence, to escape the tyranny of perfection, to inhabit a space where rank is left at the door, is genuine and widespread and not easily defeated even by its own commodification. Rikyū's argument survives its own corruption. The crawling door remains a crawling door even when it is featured in an architecture magazine.

The Surprising Truth: Wabi-Sabi Is a Modern Invention

Here is the fact that most articles about wabi-sabi leave out, possibly because it complicates the narrative considerably: the compound term "wabi-sabi," as a unified aesthetic concept, was not in common use until the second half of the 20th century. Scholars who have examined Japanese tea ceremony texts from the 17th through early 20th centuries find that wabi and sabi were used separately, sometimes together, but without the weight of a unified philosophical system. During most of the Edo period, they barely appear in tea texts at all.

The dominant aesthetic values of Edo-period urban Japan were iki and sui — sophisticated, urbane concepts associated with the merchant classes of Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka. Iki described a certain cool elegance, an understated worldliness that knew its own value without insisting on it. Sui was a related sensibility, associated with the floating world of entertainment and pleasure. Neither had much to do with rough bamboo pillars or hand-molded clay bowls. The tea ceremony world had its own internal vocabulary, and wabi was part of it, but it was not the term you would have reached for if you wanted to describe the essential character of Japanese aesthetics to a stranger.

What changed? The Meiji period (1868–1912) brought Japan into sudden, destabilizing contact with Western modernity, and with it came the need to define what was distinctively Japanese. Intellectuals and cultural nationalists assembled a usable past — selecting from the enormous range of actual Japanese aesthetic history those elements that seemed most distinctive, most coherent, most available for contrast with the West. Wabi and sabi were selected for this project, polished, and combined.

The process accelerated dramatically around 1964, when Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games and Japan presented itself to a global audience for the first time in the television age. Cultural exporters reached for concepts that could explain Japan to outsiders in attractive and differentiated terms. Wabi-sabi — ancient-sounding, philosophically substantial, visually distinctive — was ideal. The 1970 Osaka Expo deepened this process. By the time Leonard Koren published "Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers" in 1994, the concept had been sufficiently curated for its Western debut.

Koren's book is significant precisely because it was, in his own account, the text that introduced the term to the non-Japanese world. Every book published in English with "wabi" or "wabi-sabi" in the title — and there are dozens — builds on the conceptual framework Koren established in those hundred-odd pages. Koren was trained as an architect, had spent years in Japan, and brought an outsider's clarity to concepts that Japanese practitioners often regarded as too fundamental to define. His formulation — things are imperfect, things are impermanent, things are incomplete — gave the concept a portable grammar that could travel.

"Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty and it occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as the Greek ideal of beauty and perfection does in the West."

— Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (1994)

What is important to understand is that none of this historical construction invalidates the experience of wabi-sabi. The experience of standing in a small, simply furnished room and feeling something ease — the specific relief of a space that is not trying to impress you — is real. The recognition that a cracked tea bowl, repaired with gold, contains more meaning than an intact one, is a genuine aesthetic insight. The problem with the invention narrative is only when it is used to dismiss what was invented. A concept can be constructed and still be true.

Perhaps the most wabi-sabi thing about wabi-sabi is that it is imperfect, incomplete, and has been revised over time. It arrived at its current form through a messy process of selection, translation, and commercial packaging. Rikyu would have understood. He also understood that purity is a fantasy, and that the honest thing is to work with what you have.

How to Live Wabi-Sabi Without Making It an Aesthetic

There is a temptation, when encountering wabi-sabi through the filter of contemporary design culture, to treat it as a style to be achieved — a set of visual choices, a palette of materials, a mood board. This is understandable. It is also exactly what the concept resists. The difficulty of wabi-sabi is that it cannot be purchased, assembled, or photographed into existence. It can only be practiced, imperfectly, over time.

The philosopher and folk art theorist Soetsu Yanagi put this with characteristic directness: we are repelled by the perfect because perfection leaves nothing for the imagination, no space for the viewer to enter, no incompleteness that calls for participation. The perfect object presents itself fully and finally. The imperfect object — the hand-thrown bowl with its slight asymmetry, the worn stone step that has accommodated ten thousand feet — opens outward. It is not finished. It invites completion.

This is closer to the actual practice of wabi-sabi than any design principle. It is not primarily about what you own or what your rooms look like. It is about how you encounter what is already around you. The tea ceremony is the most sustained formal expression of this practice: the ceremony's strict attention to every gesture, every sound, the quality of light, the temperature of the room — this hyperawareness is not about control. It is about being actually present to what is happening, rather than thinking about what should be happening instead.

The Buddhist psychologist and meditation teacher Shunryu Suzuki — who spent decades bridging Japanese Zen and American practice — described the underlying orientation as "beginner's mind": the mind that encounters each situation freshly, without the overlay of expectation or habit. The tea bowl that you see with beginner's mind is not "the chipped one" or "the green one" or "the one that needs replacing." It is this bowl, in this light, held by these hands, at this particular unrepeatable moment. That act of attention is wabi-sabi, not the bowl itself.

The practical translation is less mystical than it sounds. It involves, mostly, a shift in the stories you tell about imperfect things. The linen shirt that is wearing through at the elbows is not a shirt that needs replacing. It is a shirt that has been worn, seriously and repeatedly, for years. The garden that has moss growing where the stones have settled is not a garden that needs maintenance. It is a garden that is becoming itself. The relationship that has accumulated awkward silences and unexplained grievances along with its tenderness — this is not a relationship that has failed to be perfect. It is a relationship that has lasted.

None of this requires poverty or deliberate deprivation. Rikyū was not poor. He had access to the most elaborate material culture in 16th-century Japan. He chose simplicity with full knowledge of what he was rejecting. Wabi-sabi is not the aesthetics of having nothing. It is the aesthetics of noticing what you have — which sometimes requires letting go of what you think you should have instead.

Why the World Is Reaching for Wabi-Sabi Now

The timing of wabi-sabi's global moment is not mysterious. The concept began its international spread through Leonard Koren's 1994 book, riding the wake of Japan's enormous cultural influence in the design world during the 1980s and early 1990s. But the acceleration visible in the 2020s is driven by something more urgent than aesthetic fashion.

The wellness-oriented interior design market is projected to reach USD 1.37 trillion by 2030. According to the Art Basel and UBS 2025 Art Market Report, over seventy percent of collectors now cite "emotional resonance" as a key factor driving art purchases — a reversal from decades in which investment potential dominated the conversation. A 2024 Deloitte Art and Finance Report found that sixty-two percent of millennial collectors specifically prioritize artworks with "emotional or mindfulness-driven value." These numbers describe a market that has stopped shopping for status and started shopping for feeling. Wabi-sabi is among the most coherent aesthetic frameworks available for people who know what they do not want — perfection, performance, the exhausting maintenance of an immaculate surface — but are still working out what they do want instead.

The burnout economy plays its part. A workforce that spent decades optimizing, quantifying, and presenting polished outputs to performance review panels has arrived, in large numbers, at a recognition that this is not sustainable and may not even be desirable. The concept of imperfect as valuable carries therapeutic weight in a culture that has weaponized perfectionism. Wabi-sabi does not ask you to perform excellence. It asks you to notice what is actually in front of you.

The "Japandi" design trend — a fusion of Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetics with Scandinavian minimalism — has dominated interior design discourse since 2023 and shows no signs of fading. Its characteristic visual language (muted earthy tones, natural materials, intentional asymmetry, handmade objects) borrows the visual grammar of wabi-sabi without, for the most part, the philosophical substance. This is the merchant-class problem again: the aesthetic divorced from the practice, the form without the function. A Japandi living room curated from a design brand catalog is not wabi-sabi. But it gestures toward something people are genuinely hungry for, and the gesture is not nothing.

TikTok has contributed its own specific register. Beginning in 2024, a viral trend emerged around the phrase "it's got wabi-sabi" — borrowed from an episode of the animated series King of the Hill — in which users applied the phrase to everyday imperfect things: a lopsided homemade cake, a car with a minor dent, a garden that had grown outside its planned boundaries. Cultural critics were divided on whether this represented a democratic spread of a genuinely useful concept or a hollow viral appropriation. The answer is probably both. The merchant class is always among us.

What makes this moment different from the 1994 moment of Koren's book, or the 1964 moment of the Tokyo Olympics, is the specific character of the exhaustion driving the interest. Digital culture has created, for the first time in history, an environment in which imperfection is technically avoidable in representation. Every photograph can be filtered, every surface digitally retouched, every moment curated for optimal presentation before it is shared. The pressure to inhabit a perfected version of your life online has produced, as a predictable counter-reaction, a hunger for the unretouched, the irregular, the genuinely made-by-hand. Wabi-sabi arrived in the cultural conversation exactly when it was needed, which suggests it may have been needed all along.

The philosopher and cultural theorist Richard Powell's formulation has become something like the standard Western gloss: "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." This is correct and useful, but it is also, in some ways, the easy part. The harder part — the part Rikyu died for, the part the merchants performed without practicing, the part that kintsugi embodies in gold and lacquer — is what you do once you have accepted these three truths. How do you actually inhabit impermanence rather than merely acknowledge it? How do you make something, knowing it will not last? How do you love something, knowing it is already changing?

The tea ceremony, at its best, answers these questions not in words but in practice. You prepare for weeks for a gathering that lasts a few hours. You use bowls that may be centuries old and are irreplaceable and could break at any moment. You arrange flowers that will be dead by the following morning. You make, out of these transient elements, a singular occasion that exists once and cannot be repeated. And then it is over, and it is gone, and it was beautiful.

That is wabi-sabi. Not the linen curtains. Not the muted palette. Not the carefully distressed pottery on the shelf. The experience of making something beautiful with the full knowledge that it will not last — and making it anyway, with full attention, because this moment is the only one available.