All in the Mind or Why It Has Always Been Hard to Concentrate

This week I needed to write something. It is hard enough to do so but with the many and easily available distractions that assail us. At every turn, in recent decades things have got markedly worse than in the days before the digital era.

But before you throw up your hands in despair I have some words of consolation: such a struggle was ever thus.

Take a look at what is known as the Middle Ages. Now you cannot get a more different time to our own. No electricity, never mind internet, and, yet, it was during such seemingly quieter days that men and women of earlier times dealt with the same issues of concentration as we do today.

How do know? Well we have many records from then what today would be termed a control group, namely, monks and nuns. Crucially they were – at least some of them – educated and could read and write, unlike the vast majority of the population. So they left us records.

These monks and nuns had given up the very things that most people desired – families, properties, their own freedom through vows of obedience. This was all part of a religious calling that sought a higher path than that of merely sensual or material pleasures.

These vows and the lifestyle that accompanied it were not meant to erode any sense of individual freedom but somehow to enhance that and orientate it to a higher end.

But they still remained men and women; and their minds on occasion did wander as much as they wondered about life elsewhere. How do we know this? Well just take a look at any manuscript from that era. These were the work of certain monks within the monasteries and involved the laborious transcribing of the Bible and other religious texts into what are known today as Illuminated Manuscripts.

And, by the look of things, medieval monks had just as terrible a time concentrating as we do. And this while the way of contemplation was their lifelong work. The monk’s technology was obviously not the same as ours is today. But their lack of concentration and their day-dreams feel very 21st century. Distraction was the same then as it is today and, doubtless, as it will be in the centuries ahead

The Illuminated Manuscripts were filled with imaginary pictures. In the Scriptorium – the monastic room or rooms dedicated to transcribing the manuscripts – monks would in addition to writing out the sacred text form cartoonish figures, often along the edges of the manuscript. These authors would write vivid narratives or sculpt grotesque figures that embodied the ideas they wanted to communicate. The point wasn’t to paint these pictures on parchment. It was to give the mind something to draw on, to indulge its desire for aesthetically interesting forms so as to sort its ideas into some form of logical structure. It was also the process by which the authors kept their minds occupied with something that felt palpable and engaging. Thereafter, their work of concentration felt less like a tiresome and more like a pleasant escape.

Here we have evidence of a modern problem in an earlier time. Not so much sending selfies or fiddling around on a cell phone as scribbling on the edges of the manuscript, a permanent testament to mankind’s ever restless mind. But also we have the ancient understanding of how to counter this trend.

Believe it or not the monks of yore complained about being overloaded with information – sounds familiar? And when they did finally settle upon something to read they soon got bored and wanted to move on to something else. During their work they stared out the window; they checked the time; they let their thoughts wander to food and other sensual pleasures. Sometimes they sensed that they were being tempted. They blamed demons that were making their minds wander. Sometimes they blamed their own base instincts.

They may have left the world but the world had not left them. It was all around the monastery and it was all around and still within the monks who lived there. But for men and women whose lives were dedicated to contemplation they knew where the root of the problem lay, namely, in the mind.

They knew the mind jumped around. 5th century John Cassian, an early Church Father and one of the early Christian monks, knew this problem all too well. He complained that the mind “seems driven by random incursions”, wandering around like it were drunk. It would think about something else – sometimes anything else -while it was supposed to be praying or singing the Divine Office. The mind would meander before sitting and enjoying the gaze of its future plans or its past regrets in the middle of mental prayer or Lectio Divino (spiritual reading). It struggled to stay focused on its own entertainment – let alone the efforts it took to stay focused on the things that took more serious concentration.

Now this was in the late 420s when John Cassian had not even seen a smartphone. Still his words ring true for us in what could be described as

our collective cognitive crisis, or to put it more bluntly our collective inability to concentrate.

Cassian was writing at a time when Christian monastic communities were beginning to boom across Europe after their earliest manifestations in Egypt and the Middle East. A century earlier than Cassian, the first Christian ascetics had taken to the deserts fleeing the cities to live mostly in isolation. However, mankind is if nothing else a social animal and soon this new enthusiasm expressed itself in communal enterprises that eventually consolidated into what would become known as monasteries. Today these physical manifestations would be termed innovative social spaces or some such. Designed to function best when monks had a rule to live by, what would be known today as a Mission Statement, and with guidelines on how to live, work and pray in that shared space.

Meditation, both collective and individual, was a key part of this. For these monks, the meditating mind was not a mind at ease, doing nothing. Instead, it was supposed to be energized. The word used by monastic writers to describe this stemmed from the Latin tenere, meaning to hold tight to something. The monk’s ideal was a mens intentus, that is a mind always and actively reaching out towards something, in their case the Divine. And to do so this meant having to acknowledge their own inherent weaknesses both of mind and body.

There were many theories in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages about the connections between the mind and body. Authors of those times agreed that the body had endless cravings and appetites for food, sex and comfort. All of which were only held in check by the mind. The monks of old realized that the mind was best held in check by concentrating on something preferably while the body was in action.

So distraction is an age-old problem. It is perhaps unrealistic to imagine we can avoid it. But it is in the imagination that we can also find a solution. The monks of old knew that using the distraction was the way to concentrate. For today’s entrepreneurs, and creative ones at that, this is the real challenge. It is turning a negative into a positive, a seeming diversion into the means by which we can become even more creative.