Attention

Could it be old age that makes one's thoughts wander? I wonder.

Or could it be a more complex process that lies behind the seeming attenuation of one's attention span?

I suspect that, as you get older, there's so much more information coming at you from every direction that it becomes more difficult to fix on just one piece of it for long. Not only that, but all the facts you have accumulated in a lifetime will add to the load, and by a simple process of association, they intrude upon your thinking, and thus they tend to lead your thoughts down other primrose paths.

That's what happens when I go to the dictionary to look up a word. If I happen to chance upon a page or pages containing an interesting word, that new word will invariably capture my attention, and the word I had started out with gets lost in the shuffle.

Could this be due to just a lack of discipline on my part? Maybe so.

And can the problem be corrected? We'll see.