We Live in the Present. But We Feel in the Past and Future

I watched a film tonight. By morning, the feeling will be gone.

Not completely. There will be something left - not motivation, not a plan. Just an aftertaste. A faint trace of a life I didn't live.

I've felt this before. Walking my dog on a cold evening, a smell or a temperature throws me back twenty years. A bonfire in August. The cold behind my back, warmth in front. Walking home through the dark.

The feeling is real. The moment is not.

That's the strange thing about being human. We live in the present. But we feel somewhere else in a past that's gone, or a future that won't come.

The present doesn't need imagination. It just is. Maybe that's why it feels quieter than the rest.

The past and future are constructions. We build them. We fill them with feeling. And somehow they feel more alive than the moment we're actually standing in.

It's not a bug. It's just what consciousness does when it has too much space.

It wanders. Into the bonfire. Into the bonfire. Into the tennis court I'll never coach on. Into the football pitch I never played on.

We are not just the sum of what we did. We are also the sum of what we didn't.