Dr. Kim Hermanson

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

simone weil

To Know a Thing is to Awaken to its Depth

Thomas Aquinas once wrote that “To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence.” According to Aquinas, each thing (and each of us as well) secretly and profoundly “desires to be known.” My passion has always been teaching and learning, and in Aquinas’ remarks we see how central beauty is when we teach and learn. Beauty is the depth at which we see something, meaning that we aren’t seeing the person/student/client through an old, cloudy “image” of who we think they are. As the philosopher Simone Weil said, paying attention to another is an act of love.

Sort of like watching a flower blossom.

Paying attention is an act of love

In many respects, all we have in this life is our attention. We’re shaped by what we pay attention to. Our lives are the result of what we pay attention to.

My current favorite read is Eric Booth’s book, The Everyday Work of Art. Booth writes on page 61: “If our experience of being alive is the most valuable thing, then what we pay attention to becomes a critical choice, and developing how we notice becomes the most important thing we can do.”

In Waiting for God, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote that paying attention to another was an act of love.

Makes sense to me.