The Anguish of "Attainment"

I explained to the other facilitator in the group practice tonight how trying to attain something in meditation is always accompanied by a certain kind of anguish. I may not be using the correct word here, but I am thinking about Jean Paul Sartre's use of the term, to describe that sense of having to continually re-build or re-commit oneself even after they have made some kind of inroad in that commitment. It is also something akin to Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mountain. The more I try to encapsulate what a 'good' meditation sitting might happen to be, the more I experience the fear of losing it, as well as the nausea of knowing that it will fade or need to be rebuilt again.
    The thing is, meditation can say an awful lot to us about our desires for neat and perfect narratives, as well as the fears that our narratives will discontinue, for unforeseen circumstances. I have often heard post-retreat sharing in which participants couch their meditation experience in terms of very familiar, grand narratives of loss, struggle, redemption, success, and return. It is as though without these hopeful stories, others could not find any reason to practice. I tend to take the opposite approach, in suggesting that meditation is post-structural: it has the power to subtly deconstruct our narratives, by suggesting that experience outlives the fickleness of narratives. I say 'fickle' because, indeed, although I may be having the time of my life in one meditation sitting, that narrative hardly holds true for future meditation sittings. This is perhaps the anguish that needs to be faced: impermanence, or what Sartre might have regarded as the negation that is at the heart of being.