I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.
My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.
Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.
'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.
Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore.
Moments into minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into days. Days into years. Years into possibility. This will linger.
I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.
