What's meditation about?

...I tell [Kyodo Roshi] I want to "take my practice to a deeper level." 'Deeper level'?" He laughs again. "What you mean 'deeper'? Zen practice only one level. No deep, understand?"

Lawrence Shainberg Ambivalent Zen

I've heard many claims for meditation over the years. That it's about: gratitude; deepened and/or heightened awareness (!); compassion; emptiness; spaciousness; discovering one's true self and/or spirit; dissolving the self; being present in the moment; opening to the wonder of it all; finding peace; encountering our Buddha nature; seeing the connectedness of everything; letting go; (fill in the blank___________).

It seems to me, though, that meditation isn't about anything. Meditation is meditation, and any attempt to define it in terms of something else simply confuses the issue and makes it vulnerable to being treated like any other system, technique or process to enhance our lives. Lord knows, these days we have enough ways to be better people, get closer to God, find ourselves and enhance our circumstances. We're swamped with therapies, self-help books and spiritual techniques which treat our lives as projects to be tweaked and fixed in order to improve our inner experience.

Isn't meditation (if it's anything at all) a relief from all this? Isn't it the opposite of repairing and adjusting and striving and perpetually wanting things to be different from what they actually are? For me, it's the haven away from the ubiquitous world of self-improvement. So that when I hear words like 'effort' and 'discipline' and 'deepening one's practice' spoken in the same breath as 'meditation,' I wince a little.

Because there are such amazing rewards for doing absolutely nothing: unbidden, breath comes and goes, eyes see, ears hear, thoughts flurry like leaves in fall--that to set out to experience anything else (even an end to desire!)--feels like a rejection of this life lived in this moment, a slap in the face for mere existence.

How can life be so beautiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?

Umberto Eco Foucault's Pendulum