The past and future are real illusions; they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. — Alan Watts

The past and future are real illusions; they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Author: Alan Watts

Insight: We spend so much mental energy fleeing from yesterday and anxiously building castles in tomorrow that we barely notice the only moment we actually get to live. Your regret about something that happened five years ago? It's happening in your mind right now. Your worry about next month's deadline? Also happening now. The irony is that by constantly escaping the present, we actually make our present life feel thinner and less real, when it's the only place anything actually occurs. This matters because it reframes a lot of modern suffering. We think we're suffering from the past or future, but we're really suffering from the story we're telling ourselves about them in this moment. That nagging sense that you wasted time, or that things need to be different than they are—that's all real and worth taking seriously, but it's also all happening in the present, which means it's also where you have the actual power to shift something. Not by pretending yesterday didn't happen or by magically solving tomorrow, but by noticing what's available to you right now: your breath, a choice about how you respond, the texture of whatever you're doing. The slightly unsettling part? This also means you can't actually escape. But that's also the freedom.

Source: The Way of Zen, p. 20, 1957