Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.It's a statement of great rhetorical flourish, which actually invites some analysis, because of course it can't be literally true. You can't really live in the future.
Yet we speak constantly of choosing to live in the time of our choice. We are told not to live in the past. We are told, very often lately, to live fully in the present.
What people are talking about is where our mental focus is, where our minds dwell.
I think of us as living in a wildly elastic present. Our minds are built to grasp vast epochs of time. This is not a gift that we should turn away from as a matter of policy. Living only in the moment, if understood literally as not looking ahead or behind, is a recipe for short sighted disaster and a strange obliviousness about the course of one's life.
I am reminded of some haunting words from Into The Woods:
Oh. if life were made of moments,We are possessed of both memory and vision, and the one supplies the other with the raw materials for bettering our existence.
Even now and then a bad one-!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one.
You have to breathe now
but it's up to you how
your mind leaps about
as it works your life out.
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