I get really pissed off when I can't figure something out, and the concept of 'time' has screwed with me time and time, again. In the most recent couple of months, however, I found myself in a situation that has fucked me over in the most extraordinary way.
It's a very personal thing to decide what time you value the most: the past, the present, or the future. Now, it may very well be dependent on the quality/composition of the life that happened/is happening - and, obviously, you can't know what will happen...the only thing that is absolutely certain is you only have NOW. And what you do with your 'now' determines what time you value the most. I have no idea why, but I have this really weird analogy: each time setting is a child. Your past is the oldest child, the present is the middle child, and the future is your youngest.
If you dwell in the past, you're spending your 'now' on the unchangeable, thus, creating a 'newer past' that consists of only more of that same 'past'. It's a setback. You'll try to re-experience something that was meant only for the time that had already passed. The past is your oldest child - imagine he/she is matured and ready for college. Ready to be let go of. If you keep him/her with you - in your 'now' - he/she will only keep growing old on you. Your past will only grow older - you will only grow further away from it. The present is your middle child - this time is overlooked/neglected and independent from any other time. Though the present is the only thing you have control over, there are just too many things that compromise the ability to embrace the 'now' - such as the future. I find that the future, or the youngest child, demands so much of your attention (the way the youngest of children do) that the present is spent on something that just never comes.
And in a very strange sense, I've come to hate thinking about the future. So many people stress about something that's never certain. Preparing for the future is a game of chance. You think you're doing all these things because you'll thank yourself later, but you're just banking on the assumption that everything will turn out the way you prepared for it...but every life is different (DIFFERENT CONTEXTS), and so we split our attention accordingly. I'm, honestly, just hoping that I have figured some universal truth to how each moment should be approached.
My favorite TV show is the Fox network's "Touch" with Kiefer Sutherland. It ran for 3 seasons and then was cancelled, I think, due to lack of viewers. But for almost all the episodes, the Jake Bohm (the protagonist's son) would open or close with a rather existential monologue that served as the 'life lesson'. Here's one of them on the subject of 'now':
"There are 31,530,000 seconds in a year. 1,000 milliseconds in a second. A million microseconds. A billion nanoseconds. And the one constant, connecting nanoseconds to years, is change. The universe, from atom to galaxy, is in a perpetual state of flux - but we humans don't like change. We fight it. It scares us. So we create the illusion of stasis - a world at rest, or a world of "right now". It is comfortable. Yet our great paradox remains the same: the moment we grasp the "now"... that "now" is gone. We cling to snapshots, but life is moving pictures - each nanosecond different from the last. Time forces us to grow - to adapt. Because every time we blink our eyes, the world shifts beneath our feet."
Everyone has a different 'now'. The bracket in which you define your present (literal seconds or a 24-hour day) - it all ends up being the same thing if you think about it...because of how it is a constant motion. Time waits for no one. Your 'now' is yours...spend it wisely.
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