Of late, I have made the decision to actively avoid passive observation. Everything I notice I want to pay deliberate, dedicated attention to. Granted, I am only human and it would be impossible to carve out the time to visually dissect anything my gaze lands on. But if my eyes linger on something, anything, for more than just a moment then I choose to let my mind do the same. Take this philosophy, apply it to other areas of life and watch it all become more beautiful. The feeling that arises is admiration. For one, savouring food becomes more enjoyable. I have loved listening out for minor sounds in what I otherwise might have determined as silence. I hug people a little longer because I let them release when they feel ready to. I’m not bothered by the thoughts that distract me enough to require rereading a page of a book. In fact, I try to embrace it. To sit with the thought instead. It needed to appear when it did, surely. Who am I to question it? Naturally, more questions arise. If all of life is divinely predetermined, that would mean the small, seemingly random, distracting thoughts we try to hurriedly evict are equal to the larger feelings that we choose to make a home for? What makes something worthy of attention beyond the fact that it has attracted it? Why not remove this, ultimately self imposed, hierarchy of experience and simply witness it instead?
It’s this. This concept of ‘witnessing’. It soaks inside my mind in reoccurring cycles. Often, it itself becomes the distracting thought I need to make room for. Still, I embrace the cycle. Mull it over, wring it out. Rinse, repeat, hang the idea outside to dry but it returns. Somehow, it always circles back to either one of the following two things: Islam, specifically the shahada, and one particular narrative mediation in the novel Motherhood (2018) by Sheila Heti.
‘Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness — if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new — can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. That’s a kind of alchemy. The philosophers wanted to turn dark matter into gold, and I want to turn my mother’s sadness into gold. When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold.’
In a way, it’s giving ‘if a tree falls down in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, did it even make a sound?’ because I don’t think perceiving something is what gives rise to its existence or relevance or ‘soul’. But it does force you to consider the moral weight of witnessing. How much responsibility does one hold for the world around us — like seeing a child outside lost in a busy street without a parent, or a hazard in the road forcing cars to drive around it that I, on foot, can easily remove. In that sense, I do think witnessing is golden. It transforms observation into action. And unlike the narrator, I think paying attention alone is still enough even without transforming it into something meaningful. Surely, if you believe in predetermination, then attentiveness becomes meaningful in and of itself as it symbolises an acceptance of fate, right? Right. But what does that translate to when we witness suffering like the narrator does. I suppose it’s different when that suffering is accessible, when we are close enough to attempt to alleviate it or make a change somehow. It’s more complicated. The hierarchy remerges — is the life-long suffering of Palestinians akin to that of the narrator’s (presumably, because I read Motherhood two years ago and can’t remember) suburban, middle class, white Canadian mother’s temporary sadness? Obviously not. But I know which is witnessed everyday and which is inaccessible and which we have failed to alleviate. What is there to do when our witnessing feels powerless? Does that then leave a mark on our morality?
Still, I hesitate. I can recognise there is a danger in me invoking real suffering for a metaphor in my own reflective thought experiment but I am reminded in Islam the act of witnessing is far from powerless. Where Heti asks whether attention grants soul, my faith insists that the act of bearing witness is the soul’s foundation. It is the very first pillar of religion. For a Muslim, witnessing is both of the heart and of external display. You must believe there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad ﷺ is His messenger, and you must make a public testimony of that belief. This is the declaration of faith, the shahada. I think of what it would have meant to recite the shahada when it was first being uttered. Bearing witness is rebellion. It is a rejection of cultural conditioning. It is a sacred act. It counters passivity. I wonder if that makes my decision to actively notice the world around me more Islamic.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been circling around all along: that witnessing is not just a thing we practice, but a way of being. Not to control, nor to fix, but to refuse indifference. It might not necessarily always change something external but I know it has fundamentally changed me. I suppose there it is. There is my decision, turned into gold.
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