Attention is important. The ability to direct your attention where you want is important. If you can do it well then you can do tricks like “concentration”. Concentration is necessary for careful doing and deep seeing. Every engineer, scientist, artist, lawyer and professional thinker needs concentration to do their job.
People with ADHD have a problem controlling their attention. Or something. Normies aren’t too good at it either. (Is the ability to concentrate on stuff that you don’t really care about, to do that a lot every day, a power or a weakness? Good question but beside my point).
Meditation is all about getting better at using attention. Getting better control over it, seeing it doing its thing better, learning its ways.
We basically have 2 techniques. In the first one you practice concentration. It’s a skill that you get better at. And then you take it deeper and you learn a lot. You gain a superpower.
The second one is trickier but better.
The Buddhists call the techniques samatha and vipassana.
Now, if only I could focus on meditation for more than a minute or two.
Concentration meditation is hard for everybody.
If you can do it for 3 seconds straight then you’re doing great.
So you do it for 2 or 3 seconds, get distracted by your thoughts, notice that you got distracted, return to meditating, and so on.
And then maybe tomorrow you can do it for 4 seconds.
You get MUCH better with practice.
Ok now that I can meditate: now what?
I’m just selling superpowers here. I’m in no position to tell you how to run your life.