What Monks Know About Focus

“Every acquired skill and every discipline,” says Moses, “has a scopos and a telos , some immediate goal and some ultimate goal that is particular to it. Practitioners of any skilled craft will gladly and good-naturedly work through all their fatigue and risks and costs as they keep those goals in mind.”

Nestorus’s third and most mysterious reason for immersive reading is that sustained engagement deepens our understanding of what we read by the changes wrought in ourselves through the very process of reading.

But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And “all machines,” as Thoreau once said, “have their friction.” The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to work

“It is impossible for the human mind to empty itself of all thoughts,” says Abba Nestorus, a hermit interviewed by Cassian and Germanus. The question is what kind of thoughts to entertain? Nestorus advises the pair to immerse themselves in sacred reading. “Do it continually—or better, nonstop!—until that constant recitation and reflection saturates

“How the scriptures look depends on what the human senses are capable of,” he says. “As our mind is gradually remade through this sustained effort, the shape of the scriptures begins to be remade, too, and it’s as if the beauty born of this more sacred perceptiveness grows as we grow.”

Germanus directed this second comment to Abba Serenus of Scetis, who responded, “The nous or mind is defined as aeikinētos kai polykinētos , always and very much on the move.” You might recognize our word kinetic in the Greek. This bubbling, jumping, flitting mind can only be tamed by training through meditation, memorization, fasting, and other fo

First, when a person is engrossed in literature, the mind can stay attuned to its content instead of “toxic thoughts.” Second, an understanding of the text comes not only while reading, but also when we take those thoughts with us into other mental states. We’re able to reflect on what we’ve read when we’ve turned out attentions elsewhere, even whe

When we approach any task, as Mark notes in her book, Attention Span , we do so by constructing cognitive frames that marshal the various mental resources required for the activity. When distractions occur, we change frames mid-action. The frustration we feel in getting back on task involves the difficulty in reassembling the cognitive frame we enj

“The mind is always moving and meandering, and it’s torn apart in different directions like it’s drunk,” says Germanus at one point. “It doesn’t even have the power to hold onto or stick with things it finds entertaining!”