I had this realisation back in the late 90s/early 2000s but it's been sitting in my mind lately for some reason, so I thought I'd rekindle it and take it a bit further.
My initial thought was that the present is actually the nanosecond in which the future becomes the past. As soon as you've thought, said or done anything, it's part of the past. "Living in the present", technically, is pretty much impossible. To do so would be to have no memory and no idea of the future.
If we take that thought further, we might consider that the intentional way of being is to live in the future. If we are being intentional, we are the thinking about what we are going to think, say or do in the future. Or are we?
Actually, living in the future is about being intentional about the outcomes you want to want to create. When I thought about writing this post, I wasn't thinking about the words I was going to write. I was thinking about writing a post about living in the future. Living in the future requires you to trust the uncertainty of what will actually happen while being clear about what you desire.
As I write, as soon as I hit a key, it's in the past. The present is only the moment of hitting the key. My mind is in the future, thinking about what I am going to write. In fact, if I was "living in the present moment", I couldn't write, because I would have no way to think forward in order to intend to write.
Of course, I'm taking things to the nth degree by defining the present as a nanosecond. You could define it as a second, a minute or five minutes, and then the present becomes a bigger place. But limiting it to a fleeting moment creates an interesting change in thought.
So, what will you think about living in the future? Too late, it's now what you thought.