'The Wandering Mind' by Jamie Kreiner
Whether it’s distracted driving or the distracted attention span of a 24/7 news cycle, distraction has become a topic of discussion. Concentration seems to slip away amidst the data deluge of mass media and social media, the endless pinging of text messages and annoying ringtones. As University of Georgia history professor Jamie Kreiner writes in The Wandering Mind, “the more things that call for our attention, the less time we spend talking or thinking about any one of them before moving on.”
The scale of distraction may be unprecedented, thanks to technology, but concerns about it aren’t new. The average peasant or trader long ago may have been unconcerned with the problem, but in the late antique or early medieval societies around the Mediterranean and Europe, monks and nuns grappled with distraction throughout their daily routine. Kreiner investigates how they struggled to stay focused on a concept beyond everyday thoughts by connecting their minds to God. They “offer a serious set of practices for cultivating attentiveness in a world in flux,” she writes, adding, “we moralize distraction in part because they did, more than a millennium and a half ago.”
Kreiner is a scholar writing in plain English for a non-academic audience, delivering her findings with a light touch. Her book benefits from reaching beyond the usual historical preoccupation with Europe, venturing to Eastern Christian monasteries as far afield as Quatar, Iraq and Iran. The monastics thought a lot about thinking; they were “deeply preoccupied by the problem of distraction.” By studying their accounts, Kreiner has discovered “a serious set of practices for cultivating awareness in a world in flux.” She notes that Daoist and Buddhist monks also “devised an extensive repertoire of attention techniques in these same centuries” but concentrates on their Christian counterparts whose legacy on Western attitudes is more pronounced.
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She finds that monks and nuns were “often savvier than the average modern person when it came to dealing with distraction.” Although they sometimes personalized distractions as demons, “they understood distraction to be linked systemically to issues of society, money, culture” and tried to create communities that ameliorated those preoccupations. “They developed physical regimens to improve the joint functioning of their bodies and minds” and experimented with mnemonic devices, meditations and metacognitive practices to sharpen and lengthen their attention.
It's not as if the monks and nuns had nothing to do aside from contemplating contemplation. They ran hospitals and inns for travelers, provided food and shelter for the homeless, advocated for prisoners, arbitrated disputes among the local population while trying—at least the best among them—to act “with an attentive heart.”
