Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever 'I make it.'
Our striving toward the future, our inner compulsion to deny the present moment, manifests itself as a continuous sense of unease and latent dissatisfaction with what is. This seems to be the 'normal' state of our civilization.
We never experience the future or the past.
We experience only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can only unfold Now.
The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.
---Eckhart Tolle, author of the book 'The Power of Now' (New World Library, 1999)