It was happening night after night; my husband or I would decide
after the children were in bed to “do a quick email check.” The other
would join in and before we knew it half an hour had passed and all we
had done was give into the temptation to idle curiosity and lose
ourselves in distraction.
We have fought this vice our whole lives—distraction, the bane of a
recollected life. It pulls one from one thing to the next, never
allowing a task to be completed well, never giving one time just to
think. The philosopher Dietrich Von Hildebrand in his book Transformation in Christ described
distraction as the “exact antithesis to recollection” and “a state of
being dragged along from one object to another, never touching any of
them by superficially” (Ch. 6). The time sap of social media and the
gossip-ridden sites of the internet are just another symptom of this
fallen human state, one that we came into when we first gave into the
vice of curiosity.
What is Von Hildebrand’s solution to being distracted? Learn how to become recollected.
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
Confessions of a Catholic Mom and Philosopher's Wife