I was ill recently. For a couple of days I was really sick, and didn't feel like doing very much other than lying around the place feeling a little sorry for myself. One of my main symptoms was lassitude. I had no energy to do anything, either physical or -- as it turned out -- mental.

I had recently begun meditating, and like most of us had encountered the problem of the mind continuing to generate its apparent random thoughts and the temptation to follow those thoughts instead of merely observing them from the point of view of ongoing awareness. The first day of my illness it crossed my mind to meditate, and almost immediately I was aware of the fact that my mind, usually this mass of thoughts, ideas, hopes and fears, was for all practical purposes still.

As soon as I realized this, it seemed to me that it would now be easy to meditate. All I had to do was to fix what little energy I had on my breathing; for the first time, meditation would actually be easy.

Of course, it wasn't. I couldn't meditate at all -- my attention would lapse almost immediately, not into thought but simply into inertia. What I came to understand that day is that -- as a Buddhist friend tells me -- meditation requires energy, effort, and concentration. That very energy which my mind uses to move from one object of fascination to another is the same energy I need to be able to meditate at all. My illness therefore proved not to be a royal road to effortless meditation; instead, it was a lesson in the importance of energy, effort and concentration to be able to meditate at all.