Simone Weil: Paying Attention as a Spiritual Exercise.
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On my third day of moving to London, I had a horrible experience. I was on the train to work and a group of football fans told me explicitly that I was not welcome in this city as an immigrant.
My excitement of being and living in London almost died down until the very evening of that same day. On my way back home, I was approached by a young man who almost angrily started asking me: Are you from London? Are you from London?
Every mental and physical muscle of mine was prepared to fight at that moment. But, then the young chap told me that something happened to his family and he was urgently looking for the train station and was wondering if I knew where he could find it.
This happened eight years ago and I had no such bad experience in London ever since, but I’ve learned a lesson from this situation that will stay with me for a long time.
Sometimes we surrender our reason to our reflexes. We cease to pay attention and refuse to think anew. This, in its turn, leads to our past experiences to define our future ones.
I. Journaling with Weil
At that time I had no idea who the philosopher Simone Weil was. I hadn’t even heard her name, but the diary entries she wrote in the early 1940s echo closely with the journal entries I wrote in 2015.
In her journals, she wrote that ‘what we call the world are the meanings that we read.’
In another entry she brings an example: ‘While walking along a deserted road at night, I glimpsed a man off to the side, waiting to ambush me. This menacing presence turned to be false when I came nearer and realised that it was, in fact, a tree.’
