This simplification of prayer is not the work of time and years.  God bestows attractions as He pleases.  He harmonizes them, however, with our interior dispositions, and the variety of our circumstances; He invites some sooner, others later.  Should He call a soul from its very first steps in the spiritual life, His will being duly ascertained, no one has the right to hesitate to obey.  In sickness, also, and in certain states of fatigue, meditation would be often impossible, and the prayer of affections becomes as it were a necessity.  Generally, it is only after a long habit of meditation that a soul feels itself drawn to diminish its considerations, and afterwards even to suppress them almost entirely and to be satisfied, or nearly so, with a simple look.  The prayer of simplicity, therefore, means ordinarily speaking, that a long journey has been traversed; it is the normal term, at which discursive prayer ends, and there is no one who may hope to arrive there in the course of time, by a generous practice of mental prayer and the other exercises of the spiritual life.  –Abbot Vitalis Lehodey ‘The Ways of Mental Prayer’