Right now I’m suffering from a particularly severe case of what Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’. For Buddhists, the phrase describes the mind’s tendency during meditation to jump from thought to thought, like a monkey swinging from the branches of a tree.

For me, it means that my concentration span has gone to absolute shit – books go unfinished, DVD boxsets go unwatched and I can’t handle an entire film unless I’m in the cinema and I have to choice but to sit and watch what’s going on in front of me. I think it’s a result of the fact that I’m in the final throes of my degree and am therefore spending my days reading and absorbing more than I ever have before. My brain is so saturated with dates, facts and words that when I try to take in large amounts of non-academic information it’s almost like my brain almost rejects it. Pretty unsettling, not to mention annoying.

Given all this, it was reassuring to stumble across this article by one of my favourite authors, Alain de Botton. It made me realise that my concentration problems are not only symptomatic of what’s going on in my own life, but also probably part of a more widespread social malaise:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere in the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties, something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture – and in the process don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave an auditorium vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening our experience is well on the way to dissolution – just like so much of what once impressed us and which we then came to discard: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

A student following a degree in the humanities can expect to run through a thousand books before graduation day. A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints – this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. The painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for a proper engagement with a set of ideas.

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas. We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

For obvious reasons, the line about humanities students rang particularly true. Does any of this resonate with you like it does with me?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Life, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.