“Get rid of your preconceptions and go beyond a first impression”: Simon Worou shares his encounters full of humanity in his new book

Simon Worou laughs. When we ask him if this second book that he has just published echoes what he has undoubtedly experienced, he does not answer, he laughs… A laugh that undoubtedly says a lot.

It is not so much as a mayor that he wrote this second book, after “Enfant du Togo, maître en Aveyron”, but as a citizen, whose personal, public or professional life led him, like everything ultimately everyone, to meet a lot of people. With this idea that we must “strive ourselves of our preconceptions and go beyond a first impression which is, contrary to the adage, rarely the right one”.

Life can hold beautiful encounters

He recounts the day when he went to have a coffee in Rodez and quickly judged a man who did not respond to his “hello”. “However, I am ashamed of having judged him too quickly. Because he did not respond to my first “hello”, I allowed myself to put him in the box of rude people, when quite simply he was preoccupied by his concerns of another kind, health and simply was “elsewhere” when I greeted him”, concludes Simon Worou. It’s one of his many confidences that he reveals.

There is this daughter of a friend who comes to talk to him about her professional wish, this guy who before lighting his cigarette, on the terrace, asks him if it doesn't bother him, and this opens up a field of discussion, which makes tell Simon that “life can hold beautiful encounters”. Like this person who ends up telling him “before, I was racist Simon…”

This is the case throughout these pages, where his encounters have brought him into the field of health, friendship, politics, racism, rugby, Africa, the world of work, etc. And where we also guess the pleasure that Simon Worou took in writing this second book, driven, he admits, by the success of the first. “I like writing. And I still have other ideas in mind,” he laughs. A laughter that is welcoming and breaks down many barriers.