Wandering Mind: How Medieval Monks Teach Us Concentration and Perseverance

Every day we inevitably face the challenges posed by the high-tech era: trapped in a digital shell, surrounded by screens, and captivated by the algorithmic feeds of social media, we don't even notice how our attention is increasingly scattered, and time slips through our fingers. In such conditions, the ability to concentrate on one thing becomes a true superpower. However, attention and focus have never come easily to people throughout history. Even medieval Christian monks, masters of solitude and asceticism, sometimes suffered from frustrating distraction. In his captivating text, straddling fundamental historical research and self-help literature, Jamie Kreiner describes what distracted the monks from their righteous work and how they exercised their attention and memory, as well as sharing the secrets of their productivity that are still relevant today.