Time Present:

The human species is the only one that can spend much of the time away from the experience that the body is doing and spending a lot of time in a reality that does not exist: the past, that is already finished and that is continually revised and modified, and the future, that has not yet happened and that very hardly will be just as we are imagining it.
Mark Twain, the writer, expressed the concept well saying something like My life has been a succession of disasters, many of which have never happened.

It is clear that the ability to reflect on the past and the ability to plan and reason are activities of great value. But the misuse, we might say, of these abilities of the mind has a high emotional cost.

Researchers Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) studied more than 15,000 people aged between 18 and 88 across 83 countries. Using an iPhone web app, participants were asked several times a day about their mental state — whether they were present with what was happening or distracted — and their mood, rated from wellbeing to distress on a scale from 0 to 100.
Three main points emerged from this study:
  • The mind wanders very easily, regardless of the activity a person is engaged in: this happens about 47% of the time.
  • The state of mind is generally less pleasant when you are in a state of distraction, while there is greater well-being when you are in a state of presence, aware of what is happening, regardless of whether thoughts and experience are pleasant or unpleasant. Being present, beyond content, generates greater well-being. This suggests that distraction can be the cause rather than the effect of feeling less serene.
  • The state of mind (distraction/presence) is the basis of happiness or unhappiness more than what people do or what happens to them.
This shows us that happiness is not the result of external circumstances of life but of internal states, linked to the state of mind and the quality of awareness. We have about 12,000-50,000 thoughts a day and it seems that 95% are more or less the same....