If you are sitting quietly and counting breaths, and again and again you lose the thread and begin again, this has nothing to do with breathing - the breathing will continue whether you are counting or not, whether you are attending to it or not - and only to do with the mental stream, with how easily it can suffer or resist discontinuity. And is that any sort of choice? The breathing is only a particular kind of mental projection, you don't experience breathing in itself but only your available representation of breathing and what you have in the mental stream is the result of an intention to keep this representation active. And in the same way your counting is another inflection of this stream of thought or of abstract affordances, to keep a degree of self-reflection sufficient that you can remember where you are in the count. And that it is something you are doing, that you quietly strive to persist in it is just another kind of ongoing but intermittent content. So, do as you may, you are simply brought up close to the texture of the impersonal mental stream with its more and more evidently jagged quality and its sheer gratuitousness.