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With regard to your question, I am minded to use your own wording and reply koanically: what one must do is to “fight” the mind precisely by “joining with it” so as to “follow it gracefully back to the invocation”. In other words, you seem to have set up a false dichotomy. Sometimes, indeed, we must force ourselves to concentrate, while at other times we need to be gentle and as carefree as the birds in their song. In both cases, however, we are aiming for a point in between, where we are alertly relaxed, or gently at war.
If you are aware that your mind is not obeying; if you maintain the good intention of calling it back to the Name; if you are doing what you can outside the formal sessions to make certain you are fully ready for prayer—eating a balanced diet, getting sufficient sleep, avoiding disequilibriating music, movies, television, magazines, etc.; if in short you are making a proportionate effort to “live in a little garden of the Holy Virgin”: then you may be confident, as Schuon puts it, that the angels will make up for the lack in your concentration. Do not worry.