The joyful exclamations of a nature lover on a bright sunny morning can also be described as a prayer with kavanah. Even the uninitiated would agree that it hardly seems to be worth the effort to pray unless one is going to invest one's prayers with kavanah. These admonishments about kavanah do not grow out of the genre of spontaneous, inspired prayers that we have been discussing. The quest for kavanah stems from the tendency to read or recite previously conceived, fixed, written prayers. With fixed prayer, kavanah is much more difficult to come by.
Several factors work against kavanah in fixed prayer.
The words tend to be complicated, and the concepts lofty and philosophical. It was found that even poets and scholars of Hebrew literature dwelling in medieval Spain, wrote prayers in a Hebrew that was more stilted than that of their counterparts that lived in Israel and were native speakers. Operating in other than one's native language inevitably gives a feeling of being one step removed. When speaking of the regular pray-er, the numerous familiar repititions of the prayers cause the mind to wander. Daily morning services can also be a full hour in length.