The Wandering Mind: What Medieval MOnks Tell Us About Distraction

By Jamie Kreiner

I was hoping for a guide to improving my focus. This book is more of a history of the struggles of monastic practices.

"So although we might assume that our own difficulties with distraction are symptomatic of the pressures and seductions of twenty-first-century life, Christian monks in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages would have said that distraction is inherent the experience of being human."

"Obviously, premodern monks' lives were very different from ours." Monks also cast distraction as a crisis. They also had a suspicion that their predecessors were better at dealing with it. "This narrative of decline is at least as old as Christian monasticism."

"We could try out some of these strategies ourselves, and although monks found that many of them also risked be distracting, they might work better than trying nothing at all."

"Distraction and revelation could be strikingly similar."

So, meditate, remove distractions from your life, discipline and train your thought process. That will help.