As Sam Harris puts it: Meditation is the ability to not be lost in and identified with your thoughts, and to recognize when you are.

The scam is actually every second when one is not meditating. Most people most of the time live in an illusory dream world, lost in their thoughts, pushed around by those thoughts (often called “the ego”), and suffering due to them. Meditation means practicing to wake up from that illusory dream world, over and over again. And it can be done in every situation. The formal sitting down meditation is simply a process to develop, maintain and strengthen the habit.

It’s a great practice, which can both improve each moment (by realizing that each moment is actually as good as the next one, if one is simply aware instead of lost in thoughts) as well as build incremental long term resiliency against life’s adversities.