How many times did you live in the present, in the "here and now" how some mystics might put it? Can we live in the present really, or do we have to come up with compensative mechanisms to keep ourselves sane and sound?
We tend to do that, always knitting the present in exciting new shapes, always on the lookout for eye pleasing greener pastures. We remould the reality to make it more appealing. It's not just a job for poets, it's a defensive mechanism to allow us to put up with stress and boredom and we do it every day. We're a pack of defensive mechanisms that we constantly improve upon and perfect all our life.

Whatever kills you not, maketh thou stronger...

And our brain gradually becomes a stack of ever growing filtering layers and, in turn, we become ever number and number. Suddenly we discover that we've lost our joie de vivre and we don't even know at which turn in our life it's happened. Childhood becomes a distant memory, we vaguely remember once we could laugh and cry from the heart, now we can think about it and try to emulate in thinking, but we soon discover it's too strenuous an effort and we risk to shortcircuit our brain alltogether and end up in the sanitarium. So we stop thinking about it ... que sera, sera! It's all part of the maturing process, but no one asked me if I wanted to mature ... I don't! Please turn back the time!