Finding Wabi-sabi in Paradise

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese belief in the beauty of life’s transient nature. It seeks to make us appreciate the imperfection of life. Believers embrace the natural falling apart and decaying that others fight with such extraordinary measures as paint, collagen, steel wool, and replacement. The example that people often use to describe it is a chipped vase that’s more interesting than it was before it was damaged. The picture that comes to mind when I think of the word is the inside of my re-glazed sink that’s again cracked and peeling. My first impulse is to groan and start thinking of either getting a new sink or at least getting the thing re-glazed again. But then my yearning to be “wabisabic” (my word) kicks in and I try to recognize and even appreciate what I’m seeing. I can think about how many people have used it in the more than 80 years it’s been in the bathroom. I try to see beauty in its rusty parts. I even use it to complement what I see in the mirror above it—a face that’s showing its own version of gradual decay. Or maybe I’m using my unenhanced face to feel better about not replacing the sink.

I was thinking a lot about wabi-sabi last Friday when I went to the Paradise Spa in Chicago. Spa, Chicago, you’re probably picturing something swanky on Michigan Avenue. Stop it. Paradise is so much better. I’ve been to high-end spas in other cities and know what to expect—new towels in tasteful colors, elegant masseuses and aestheticians, designer-designed spaces with calming colors and smooth upholstery, soothing music, chilled glasses of water with lemon slices, probably a vessel of pebbles and something that smells like sandalwood. But Paradise eschews all of that nonsense. Its towels are worn out and come in all sorts of colors. The employees wear comfortable clothes. Every surface is chipped. There are lockers and they clang noisily. There are personal care products for you to use, but they’re either Suave or Vaseline Intensive Care.

You go to Paradise to get clean and relax. Men and women have separate facilities because every customer is naked. (At the other kind of spa you might be nude, but at Paradise you’re just plain naked.) After leaving your clothes and inhibitions in your locker, you enter the bathing area and are faced with a variety of options. The centerpiece is an 8-person hot tub, but there’s also a super hot well of water and a super cold version. There are three showers along the wall. Next to them are some faucets with little stools that you can sit and wash at. There you can see old ladies squatting and scrubbing their dentures as well as mothers and daughters washing one another’s backs. There’s a dry sauna and a steam sauna. And in an adjoining room there are lounge chairs and a TV in case you start feeling nappy. You get access to all of that for as long as you want for $20.

But for $100 you can supersize your experience, which is exactly what I did last week.

After lounging in the hot tub for a bit, I got scrubbed. For 30 minutes a middle-aged Korean woman wearing black panties and matching bra (I said they were comfortably dressed) scrubbed the heck out of my hide. For a long time she just used little scrubby pads, but then she added an abrasive product not unlike something I’ve bought from Arbonne in the past. By the end of my session the table I was lying on was covered with dead skin. It brought to mind homework that was so tricky that by the time I finished it, my pink eraser was noticeably smaller and erasure bits covered my desk. Like a troublesome story problem, I’d been erased and erased until I was just right. Frankly, that was worth the $100, but at Paradise the fun keeps coming. It was now time for my “massagie” with Emmy (that’s the only comment I’ll make about how the Koreans speak and I’m only including it because “massagie with Emmy” was such a nice mantra to say to myself as I drove to Chicago).

Emmy is from Bulgaria and in case you’re wondering, she wore normal clothes. Apparently only the scrubbers do the panty-bra thing. She didn’t chitchat. She didn’t ask me anything about myself. She didn’t tell me about her weekend plans. She didn’t make me choose between ambient music or ocean sounds. She just gave me the best massage of my life, even better than Mr. Martin Javinsky’s up in Minneapolis who left me feeling like I’d been in a car accident, but in a good way. I found out later that I could have asked Emmy to walk on my back—-that’s what those bars on the ceiling were for. Isn’t it funny how everything looks sinister when you’re somewhere new?

Back to wabi-sabi. Clearly Paradise is not fancy, what with its chipped paint and faded towels. But what I’ve discovered is that I’m okay with myself there. At the other sort of spa, I’d probably feel like I needed to hold in my stomach. Like maybe I should have cut my toenails and polished them before coming. I sure wouldn’t feel like I could get scrubbed out in the open. And I could appreciate the transient nature of youth and beauty as I looked (briefly) at the women around me who represented every possible age, shape and size. When you’re surrounded by real women who aren’t trying to impress anyone, who just want to slough off their winter flakiness and have a good soak, you realize that in our differences we’re all the same—except I’m a lot smoother than you right now. Going a step further, I guess I hope that the Paradise we’ve been looking forward to ever since we were told about What Comes Next is like the Paradise Spa. I hope it’s a little dingy and the people there are a little dumpy, because I plan to be comfortable for a really long time.