Think of it as a form of exercise. If you go back to the gym after a long break, you spend a lot of time conditioning your body just to get your muscle memory

Think of it as a form of exercise. If you go back to the gym after a long break, you spend a lot of time conditioning your body just to get your muscle memory back in sync with the machines, or free weights, or whatever you like to work out with. Meditation is analogous to that. Once you get past just figuring out how to sit, you spend more time figuring out how to breathe, and then you get to the part where you let your mind do what it does while you're breathing. But the breathing (and the standard advice to keep your attention on your breathing) is just the tip of a much deeper iceberg. So over time you get to explore the part of the iceberg beneath the water. You begin to unwind the long chains of association that exist below the level of words and verbal formations. There are good books about the impediments you will run into and strategies for getting past them (it really is like exercise). But to what purpose? Why do you exercise? Do you just want to look good? Or have more strength? Or just health for its own sake? Or do you enjoy the social camaraderie you find at the gym? Or maybe a workout just makes you feel good and requires no other justification. In the end you will need to find those answers for yourself. You have a body, but you are not your body. Exercise is practical and it works. You have a mind, but you are not your mind. Meditation is practical and it works.