Meditation: Recognizing the Capricious Mind

I've been meditating lately. It's extremely hard to do, because the brain simply just won't stop wandering away from what it's "supposed" to be doing during meditation - that is, concentrating on the breath as a conduit for focusing on the present moment. When I meditate, I found myself getting more and more frustrated with my inability to focus on my breath for more than 20-30 seconds at a time before realizing that my mind had moved onto other things; frustrated, that is, until I read this great meditation primer by Sam Harris. Specifically, I liked this:

...falling, from the point of view of vipassana, occurs ceaselessly, every moment that one becomes lost in thought. The problem is not thoughts per se but the state of thinking without knowing that one is thinking.

As every meditator soon discovers, such distraction is the normal condition of our minds: Most of us fall from the wire every second, toppling headlong—whether gliding happily in reverie, or plunging into fear, anger, self-hatred and other negative states of mind. Meditation is a technique for breaking this spell, if only for a few moments. The goal is to awaken from our trance of discursive thinking—and from the habit of ceaselessly grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant—so that we can enjoy a mind that is undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.

For some reason, I had always thought that the idea of meditation was to clear the mind of all thoughts, but Harris not only says that this is impossible, but that "every meditator" experiences this problem. This may seem obvious to you, but to me it was a real relevation. I read this passage as saying that the real goal of meditation is to accept the constant failure of your mind to focus on the here and now. Recognizing this constraint - and being aware of it constantly - will help to realize when the mind wanders away from the present. If nothing else, Harris' passage has helped me get past my feeling of meditation inferiority in favor of trying to internalize this fact.