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I am a sucker for books and movies about time travel. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the DeLorean in Back to the Future, and any Star Trek episode in which the crew of the starship Enterprise travels back to the twentieth century—I love them all. But over the years, I’ve learned a few important things about time travel. For example, as far as I can tell from these books and movies, backward is better than forward. When you travel back in time, you know what you’re getting. The future, on the other hand, is unknown and always seems to get worse. But that doesn’t mean that the past is safe. When you travel back in time, you had better not touch anything. Apparently, the smallest change can have devastating effects on the space-time continuum. You may come back to the present and find that you don’t exist.

In real life, time travel is impossible, but that doesn’t
mean I have no interest in the past or the future. The truth is, I’m often
preoccupied with both. Sometimes it’s because I’m thinking about the past,
trying to understand what I have experienced and how it affects my life. Just
as often I’m concerned about the future. Maybe it’s because I’m looking forward
to what comes next. More often it’s because I’m worried about it. What gets
lost in all of this is the present. Like the quiet child in a loud family, it’s
often overlooked. Either way I tend to brush by the present, as if it were
some stranger I pass on a busy street. Or if I do give it attention, it’s
usually only a kind of grudging consideration—the sort you might give to
someone who whines until your attention is wheedled away from the thing that
really interests you .

“I have been scattered in times I do not understand,” St. Augustine complained. He saw his life as one that stretched in many directions at once. Like Augustine, our minds too are scattered in time, so that our interests range far beyond the present. At one moment, we peer intently into the past, hoping for the mists to clear and longing to catch a glimpse of a present that has disappeared from view. In the next, we skip far ahead, hoping to scout out the future and stake a certain claim. Unfortunately, the beauty and value of the present is often lost. We are here in body but not in mind. We are only halfhearted in our attention and sometimes in our service. To someone whose interest is chiefly on the future, the present is only a way station. Its primary function is to serve as a staging ground for what comes nex...