What are you holding on to?

The past? The present? Or the future?

I call them bubbles. And I believe each one of us lives inside one or more of them, at one or more stages of our lives. Some of us refuse to take that step into the future, thinking that one day the past will come back to life. Some of us, want to run away into the future, thinking that the past cannot follow us there. I've been having long chats with many of my friends, and the more I speak with them, the more I realise that most of them, most of us don't want to live in the present.

What is it about these three distinct phases in our lives that have us tightly wound around their little fingers? Why is it that everything is either decided based on the past, or is planned for the future? Why are we so scared to accept our present, and work on it, because tomorrow it will be our past, and it will decide our future.

There's a constant crib amongst most of us- things are never in our hands. In retrospect, they are. But because we bind ourselves so much to things that are far away, we refuse to accept what we have, and we constantly crave for what we had, or what we hope we might have.

Is looking in the mirror that bad? Since when did we lose the ability to look ourselves in the eye. And shake hands with what we see, because that's all we'll ever have.

I've spent years, months, thinking about what I could have done to change the past. Off late, I've spent hours on thinking about what I can do to plan the future. Why?

A wise, wise person once said, today will soon be yesterday and tomorrow will soon be today.
In principle, yes. In reality- ha ha ha.

So is it cynicism? Is it age? Or is it just me?