The past, the present and the future are connected, and of the three only one of them actually exists. The past is finished and cannot be reached. Nothing about it can be altered, and no amount of returning changes a single detail of what took place, however much the returning feels like work. The future has not occurred and may not occur in any of the shapes we have carefully prepared for.
Only the present is here. And yet we live almost entirely in the other two, which is to say we live almost entirely in thought about a thing rather than in the thing itself. Those thoughts have no life in them. They are recordings and forecasts, and whole decades get built out of them and called a life.
None of this is said from a position of having solved it. It is perfectly possible to understand this clearly, to be able to explain it to anybody who asks, and still spend most of the day in one of the two places that are not here. Understanding it turns out to be almost entirely separate from being able to do it.
What the past is good for
There is a version of this idea which says forget the past entirely, and it is not right. Our present actions are almost always shaped by past ones, or by what we concluded from them at the time. To understand why anybody does a particular thing, the reason will very often turn out to be twenty years old and to have nothing to do with anybody currently in the room.
So the past has a genuine use, and the use is understanding. Why do we react like that. Where did that assumption come from. What was being protected when that particular habit was built. Going back for those answers is worth doing, and it is some of the most useful work anybody can do.
The difference is between visiting and living there. A visit has a purpose and an end and everybody comes home afterwards. Living there is what happens when we go back not to understand but to relitigate, to prove we were right, to feel the same feeling again for the four hundredth time in the hope that this time it resolves. Nothing has ever been learnt on the four hundredth pass that was not fully available on the second.
Why the mind goes anywhere else
The present has one quality the other two lack, which is that it cannot be controlled. The past is fixed, and there is a strange comfort in something fixed, even a painful something, because at least it will not surprise anybody. The future is entirely imaginary and therefore completely obedient. In both of those places the mind is in charge and can arrange things.
In the present it is not in charge at all. Things are simply happening and there is very little say in any of it. For a mind that manages, plans, prepares and secures, the present is the one location where none of its considerable abilities apply, and so it leaves at the first opportunity and returns to a place where it can do some work.
This is why very capable people find presence hardest of all. Their skill is precisely the thing that removes them. They are not failing at it through weakness or laziness, which is what they usually assume. They are failing at it through competence, and there is no obvious remedy for that.
What is actually being protected
Underneath all of it, the present asks something of us that the other two do not. To be fully here is to see what is actually in front of us, including the several parts that have been quietly arranged not to be looked at over the years.
The past can be edited and everybody edits it. The future can be promised and everybody promises it. The present has no such flexibility. It simply is what it is, and being in it means agreeing to see it, and there are things in most lives that somebody has been avoiding seeing for a very long time and has become skilled at not seeing.
So the wandering is not a failure of concentration. It is a strategy, and a very good one, and it has been working perfectly for years without ever needing maintenance. This becomes obvious the moment anybody notices that their mind wanders reliably at exactly the points where something true is about to become visible. It never wanders at random. It wanders on schedule, and the schedule is the thing worth looking at.
