When the Lights Go Down in the City
Three days without power is plenty of time for contemplation
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Austin had its annual deep freeze last week. Yoshiko and I were without power for 3 days, along with at least 30% of Austin. I used the opportunity to enjoy a rare moment in time where I could explore the experience of richness in insufficiency.
Where I grew up in Michigan, we would sometimes lose power once or twice a year. In summer, thunderstorms or brownouts can shut down power as easily as ice and snow does in winter. As such, I wasn’t bothered all that much when the lights went out. In fact, other than a cold house (indoor temperatures dipped to 40-45 degrees) and having to replace everything in our refrigerator, I had a rather nice time.
If you’ve never experienced an ice storm, they’re as beautiful as they are dangerous. Everything you see is wrapped in a glistening sheath of crystal. While skies tend to be gray, it’s even more stunning if the sun comes out–the whole world literally sparkles.
Beautiful though they may be, ice storms are indeed very dangerous. Entire trees, or huge branches and limbs, frequently come down during ice storms (this is what generally causes power outages). We had a number go down all over our apartment complex–including right in front of the stairs leading up to our apartment.
Fortunately, the roads were clear and some parts of town did have power. On the second day, we spent some time at our local Whole Foods using their wifi and charging our devices on their second-floor balcony.
I found myself enjoying seeing the different people who also came to Whole Foods for shelter from the storm. There was a lawyer with his shoes off and feet up on a couch, a lady with a headset taking meetings and jamming to music, engineers coding, a group of college-age guys who had a massive power brick they used to charge their phones and Nintendo Switches, and more. The diversity of people gave me a feeling of being in it together with my fellow humans, even if I wasn’t really interacting with any of them.
In the evenings, we turned on a battery-powered lantern and snuggled on the couch for warmth. We watched Harry Potter on my laptop using my phone as a tether. We even cooked some stew by lantern light to save some ingredients from spoiling.
For the most part, I felt perfectly content to weather the storm in this way. However, when I awoke on Saturday morning, the comforting breath of warm air flowing out of vents in our bedroom told me power had returned. I couldn’t help but feel relieved by the return to normalcy.
With the freeze behind us, Austin is now boasting temps in the 60s and 70s. I’ve had a couple days to think a bit more about how grateful I am to be able to easily experience and navigate extreme weather like we had. When Mother Nature comes calling with a powerful storm, it’s a not-so-subtle reminder that she is, in fact, in charge.
Once the power went out, all assumptions about how I would be living my life or spending my time went out with it. I was happy to live with the basics: a partner to pass the time with, clean water, and a gas stove, which we could easily light with a lighter to make hot water for tea or cook a simple meal. (Three guesses as to which of those two things I cared about more.)
It brought to mind the notion of wabi. Most Westerners will recognize wabi only as the first half of wabi-sabi, but in fact they are two separate things only later combined into one holistic idea. Often thought of in the West as the beauty of asymmetry, wabi so much more than a simple form of artistic appreciation. Rather, wabi is both an aesthetic and spiritual pursuit of richness in poverty.
When we are frustrated in life because things run entirely contrary to our desires, or because we’ve failed in some enterprise, the spirit of wabi lies in embracing the disappointment, frustration, and loss that goes along with it. When we are forced to go without but do not feel the lack as deprivation, or not thinking that what is not provided is deficiency, this is the spirit of wabi.
However, if we feel that not being provided for is poverty, that is not wabi but rather “the spirit of a beggar”. (Zencha Roku, Jakuan Sōtaku) This is not some Stoic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ideology, but rather a recognition of the beauty that lies inherent in life going its own way against our wishes.
When my wife woke up to no power and a world encased in ice, she pulled up a chair in front of the glass doors to our balcony and stared outside for a while. There can be no poverty in our lives when we live like this.
Let me be clear on one thing: “poverty” here is not necessarily the poverty we think of in modern cultural discourse, where one can hardly afford to live (or not at all), but rather generally “being in insufficiency”. Though the Zen practitioners of ancient Japan did often live in destitution, it wasn’t a requirement.
Living without power and not missing it is, to me, embracing the spirit of wabi. Rather than losing power and sending my sanity along with it, I accepted the gift of time to sit back and explore life turned on its head. The basics of life–the sights, smells, and sounds–had all changed and I was eager to explore that. I found camaraderie with my fellow humans who were also going without but making the best out of it. Yes, the weather was costly, even dangerous for some. However, what I gained from the weather was a richness beyond compare–that of going without and not feeling any worse for it.
Okakura Kakuzō said in his Book of Tea that true beauty lies in completing the incomplete within one’s own heart. With that ideal in mind, all things made incomplete cannot help but be beautiful as long as we are prepared to complete them with our own heart. When we do this, we are embracing the spirit of wabi and therein, amidst humble surroundings, we find its treasure: a shining heart of gold.
Header Image Credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash