answer:I’ve been meditating for something like 23 years now. How much has varied from a few minutes per day (when life gets crazy) to many hours per day (when I’m able to set other things aside for awhile). I can certainly understand the impulse behind this question: it’s natural to want to know what the payoff will be for all of that time spent, sometimes in great discomfort, so you can do a cost/benefit analysis. I guess everyone does their own version of that at the outset. People see meditation as a means to get from the way they are now to some better way to be in the future, and wonder what that “better way” will look like, and how far in the future it is. But that’s not how it works. Or not quite. Yes, changes happen over time, but the irony is that the mindset of “meditating to make change happen” is itself counterproductive. Think about how much human energy is expended trying to be something else: a better, more secure, happier You. There is a core discontent that drives this pursuit, and it’s this core discontent that also moves people to take up meditation. But the answer to the core discontent doesn’t lie in remaking ourselves in a different mold. Instead, we need to look honestly at this whole mechanism of discontent and longing for a better self. Meditation, as it turns out, is just that honest looking. This mechanism has been driving all kinds of hurt—large and small—your whole life long; it has made you focus your attention on the past and the future, because you think they tell you something about the trajectory of your journey toward this better, happier self. Meditation interrupts this mechanism by turning the light of your attention onto the present. In the process, you illuminate the workings of the mechanism (which happen in this present) and are free of its products. This isn’t making anything happen; it’s just plain seeing what’s happening. To do that, you have to let go of the whole “different me” project. That in itself is transformative. The changes will take care of themselves.