The Movement of Return

Every practice eventually comes down to this: not how focused you are, but how you come back when you're not. I look at what happens in that gap - between noticing you've drifted and actually returning - and at all the things we tend to insert there: self-criticism, scoring, the old story of I should be past this by now. None of it is necessary. There's a subtle but transferable quality in learning to return immediately, without adding a verdict. A line from Marcus Aurelius that I've read probably a thousand times probably says it better than I can. I end with a question I don't have an answer to: what would you even call this quality?