But I escaped from reality
Escaped from the pain
I said to myself
"Some day, I'll be as I should be
Though I'm far from there now"
After such excuses, my eyes were opened
All I could do was to live in the present time.

All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion — an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson.

It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts...

For he lives twice who can at once employ The present well, and e'en the past enjoy.

The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present...yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.

But this was classic Sam — he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

The ethereal past had blinded him, and the highest happiness he could dream was a return to it.

Some minds will jump here jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present. But that is hasty and illogical. How extravagant too, to pronounce our whole knowledge of the past to be mere delusion! Yet it would seem that the past is completely beyond the bounds of possible experience as a Kantian thing-in-itself.

He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.

In the street he drew a deep breath. He was free. Free from recollection and anticipation. Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of the past or future. Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be. Free — but the boast was idle; he went on remembering. Escape was not so easy a matter.

He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.