When we moved into our current home, we prioritized replacing the floors with hardwood flooring on the advice of our realtor. It made sense; it’s a lot more painful to clear away furniture and items to rip up the ground after settling in for a couple of years, and you’d even have to plan how to replace it from room to room.
Of course, as we moved in, the movers dropped a piece of furniture from the second floor and gashed the new hardwood planks pretty good. A few months later, the kids got the great idea to slide their sock drawers—with metal rails installed on the bottom—along the ground to create a makeshift boundary, drawing their own set of scars on the flooring. And despite regular vacuuming and mopping, certain common areas are well-worn with foot traffic. Much like a new car, new floors don’t stay that way for very long1.
And that’s okay! One of the hallmarks of utility is use, and with actual use comes the wear and tear of life. When magazine covers and architecture digests take glamour shots for their feature stories, the pristine appearance belies a kind of sterility; they often look meticulously designed, but mostly devoid of life. Tours of celebrity mansions exhibit the same ethos, where the rooms are so spacious yet sparse that you can safely assume it’s empty most of the year. At least with open houses, the neutral colors and minimalist staging are meant to let prospective buyers project their lifestyles onto the space.
Some domains ascribe value to the imperfections that come from use. With leather, the industry has elevated wear over time as “developing a patina”; with use, the natural oils of the leather get defused into the material and give it a different, but supposedly equally attractive, shade. Meanwhile, high-end luxury mechanical watches are graded and priced based on their flawless appearances, but—some watch collectors appreciate the accumulation of scratches and blemishes on cases and act as triggers for past memorable experiences.
One of my favorite books, The Last Lecture, was written by a professor with terminal cancer who wanted to impart wisdom to his young boys while he lived. Of all the moral stories he tells in his memoir, one anecdote stood out: driving his brand-new convertible with his children, he intentionally poured soda on the backseat, still giving off that fresh new-car smell, to make the point to his kids that material things don’t matter as much as the people and relationships. Granted, most of us wouldn’t be this extreme—people fret over a scratch on year-old cars—but his actions do put in perspective the silly lengths we sometimes go to preserve our material objects’ “mint condition.”
In Japanese culture, there’s a concept called wabi-sabi, which roughly translates to finding beauty in imperfection and honoring natural cycles of growth and decay. What I’m describing here is similar; it’s about recognizing that imperfections that come with time have their distinct value. Perhaps another way to frame this idea is that well-worn objects harbor a level of resiliency, that it can and should be used extensively and hold up well, whereby its patina proves its craftsmanship.
They age especially fast with kids in the house; ask any parent of young children, or teenagers.↩
