Eckhart Tolle wrote a very good book called The Power of Now, a book which I had some very mixed feelings on. Actually it is probably more correct to say I have some mixed feelings about its author, but in either case the overall message of the book is fantastically good, and it is written in a way that has turned out to be very accessible to a lot of people.
The message is simple. You must live in ‘the now’ (today) because that is all you have.The future does not yet exist, and the past is no longer changeable.
Take a moment and consider how profound that idea is.
Every moment of your life that you spend worrying about the future, and regretting the past, is a moment of your life you have lost forever. There is absolutely nothing you can do to get that time back.
Today is my birthday. On no other day during the year am I more conscious of the passage of time, or my mortality, and my natural human instinct is to take inventory of everything I didn’t do in the past years and wish I did, and to a lesser degree everything I did do that I wish I hadn’t (as we always regret what we didn’t do more than what we did). This is a foolish waste of my life. There is no way for the change anything about the past year, it is finished, locked, completed. Worrying about the past is like trying to erase permanent marker, the marker will stay, but you’ll certainly use up your eraser.