Our Wandering Thoughts

The time spent here, the life in solitude, and the meditation by which you think we ought to have reached perfection of the inner man have done only this for us: they have taught us what we are unable to be, without making us what we are trying to be. We do not feel that by this knowledge we have gained any settled steadiness in the purity we long for, or any strength and firmness, but only more confusion and shame. In all our discipline, our meditation aims at this in our daily study: it works from trembling beginnings to reach a sure and steady skill, to begin to know something of what it at first knew only vaguely or did not know at all, and, advancing by sure steps, so to speak, toward the mastery of that discipline, to become perfectly at home in it without any difficulty. But I find, on the contrary, that while I am struggling in this desire for purity, I have only got far enough to know what I cannot be. So I feel that nothing but trouble comes to me from all this crushing of the heart. There is never a lack of reasons for tears, and yet I do not stop being what I ought not to be. [a]

So what is the good of having learned what is best, if it cannot be reached even when it is known? For just when we have felt that the aim of our heart was directed toward what we intended, the mind, without our noticing, goes back to its old wandering thoughts and slips back with a more violent rush. It is taken up with daily distractions and endlessly drawn away by countless things that take it captive, so that we almost despair of the improvement we long for, and all these practices seem useless. For the mind wanders off aimlessly every moment. When it is brought back to the fear of God or to spiritual contemplation, it darts off and strays before it is settled there. And when we have roused ourselves and found that it has wandered from the purpose set before it, and we want to call it back to the meditation it strayed from and bind it fast with the firmest purpose of heart, as if with chains, it slips away from the innermost depths of the heart, faster than a snake, while we are still trying. So, though we are on fire with daily exercises of this kind, we do not see that we gain any strength or stability of heart from them. We are overcome, and in despair we are driven to this opinion: we believe that these wanderings of mind are found in the human race not through any fault of our own but through a fault of our nature.