“Live in the present.” “The present is all we have.” “Be mindful of the present.” “Stop worrying about the future and the past.” The fluffy, new age world has been coercing you into believing that your life would be better if only you could learn to live in the moment, the now, the present and forget the past or stop worrying about the future.
Guess what? There is no present. There, I said it. No matter what you are doing - reading, writing, walking, thinking - the moment it happens it is the past. When you are contemplating it, it is the future. There are no discreet points in time. Time is a continuum. There cannot be a present because everything is always happening and that, by definition, means it is in the past. When you step forward, each partial movement in that direction becomes the past. There is never a present because the thing that hasn’t happened yet is in the future.
The best you can hope for is to be mindful of the fact that there are only two states - what has happened, and what might happen. There is no what “IS” happening, ever.