It’s easy to jump to conclusion that “past is gone, future is not here but only present is all there is now“. But if we think about it, the “present“ is so small that whatever we perceive and do is actually past. I will give you an analogy in the second paragraph. Hearing the word “Past”, we think that we are dealing with something an hour ago or yesterday or last year or 1000 years ago. But even a nanosecond earlier is past too.
Here is an analogy.
Say…you are looking at yourself in the mirror. You might think that you are looking at yourself in present. But light travels with certain speed…doesn’t it? 299,792,458 m/s to be precise. That is roughly one foot per a billionth of a second. That means your image (light) has to get reflected from the mirror to the retina of your eye, which then gets processed in the brain. Only then you can see your reflected image. That means…what you are looking at is actually a delayed image that happened a small fraction of a second ago. We don’t feel the time lapse because the time delay is extremely small.
It’s not possible to change the actual present because it exists in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of time and by the time you think about it, it’s already past. George Carlin once said “There is no present but recent past and immediate future”. I totally agree with that concept.
That is not to mean that present is not there. It is there (or should I say was there). By the time we perceive it, its already past. It would be erroneous to cough and say that I just coughed in the present time because I coughed a second ago, which is Past, not Present.
