Wandering Mind: How Medieval Monks Teach Us Concentration and Perseverance

Every day we inevitably face the challenges posed by the high-tech era: encapsulated in a digital shell, surrounded on all sides by screens and mesmerized by the algorithmic feeds of social networks, we often do not notice how our attention... is increasingly scattered while time slips through our fingers. In such conditions, the ability to concentrate on one thing becomes a real superpower. However, attentiveness and focus have never come easily to people throughout history. Even medieval Christian monks, masters of solitude and asceticism, sometimes suffered from annoying distractions. In his fascinating text, straddling the line between fundamental historical research and self-help literature, Jamie Kreiner reveals what distracted monks from righteous work and how they trained their attention and memory, while also sharing the secrets of their productivity, which are still relevant today.