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ho can say from where the orientation comes, but we individual humans can have very different habitual relationships to time, in ways that govern a great deal of our behavior, but can remain somewhat invisible. We all live in time -- we remember the past, we act in the present, and we plan for the future. But our emphases of the importance of these positions vary trememdously; some people can be said to live in the past, or "in the moment", or for the future.
I am personally a present-focused person. I rarely find cause to recall my past, and when I do, I often feel divorced from what I am remembering; while the thread linking my current self and that past self is clear, there is not much of a bond of identity. I think differently, I feel differently, I act differently, and the memories could as easily be someone else's. This is something of an exaggeration, but it's in pursuit of clarity. For me, the past is past, useful for understanding certain things about myself and the world, but not an emotionally present reality (the vast majority of the time, anyway). I live in either an abstract timelessness in my head, or concentrated on some task, or lightly preparing for a vague future happiness.
I understand that not everyone is like me. My brother, for example, lives in the past almost as much as he does in the present. My father-in-law explains that he lives in the future (and mostly, worrying about it). To be human is to engage with the trifold manifestation of time. We are supposed to learn from the past, but also, I think, to live with the past. Furthermore, we are supposed to project ourselves and our rojects forward in time -- we should be working on things whose fruits we will never see, as John Ruskin puts it.
I often think I have a sort of myopia that comes with my focus on the present, that cuts me off to a certain extent from a kind of suffering, born of empathy. There's a danger of a certain sort of narcissism in the present moment, where we can convince ourselves of our self-sufficiency, and the closeness of our concerns. We exist now, because others cared for us in the past. Others will exist in the future, if we will take care to look beyond the horizon of the now.
And yet -- Be not therefore solicitous for to morrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.