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It’s strange how your brain can fool you—and how something small, some offhand detail, can shake your confidence in the way you remember your own life.
For years, I told the story of the dalmatian we had when I was a kid. A beautiful white dog with black spots, full of energy, tearing through the backyard, digging up the garden with a kind of reckless joy. That’s why we had to give him away. The dog just wouldn’t stop digging. It became one of those quick, emotional stories I carried with me—a flash of childhood, a symbol of something fleeting and unfinished.
And then one day I brought it up with my dad. He looked at me and said, “It wasn’t a dalmatian. It was a spaniel.”
I was stunned. I didn’t just remember that dog—I knew that dog. I could see him in my mind as clearly as if he’d been there yesterday. But apparently, the dalmatian I remembered never existed. I had invented him—half from feeling, half from imagination—and carried that image for decades.
If a memory so vivid could be wrong, what else had I rewritten without even realizing? What else had I turned into a story without knowing it?
The act of remembering is not a retrieval but a recreation.
We have been taught the past is fixed—a record of what has happened. The future, uncertain and unknown, is the territory of possibility. And yet, what science and philosophy are revealing, with an intimacy and precision our ancestors could only dream of, is that both the past and the future are creations of the mind. Only the present, fleeting and indivisible, is objective. All else is artifice.
There is something deeply moving about this revelation. It does not diminish our humanity—it illuminates it.
Memory, we now know, is not a storage bin of facts and figures, but the beating, breathing phenomenon of recollection. Each time we remember, we do not pull out a file from the cabinet of the brain. We reconstruct the past. We infer, we embellish, we forget. The act of remembering is not a retrieval but a recreation. The brain opens the memory like a manuscript, edits the text—sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly—and binds it again, unaware that it has revised history.
And why does the brain do this? Because it is not designed for truth—it is designed for survival. To remember is to prepare: to use the past, not to dwell on it, but to anticipate what may come. Memory is not the faculty of historians—it is the engine of prediction.
This is not merely a neurological trick. It is the structure of our lives. We tell stories about ourselves, about where we have been, and these stories, repeated and reshaped, become the tapestry of identity. But that tapestry is stitched not only with threads of what happened—but with what we need to have happened. With what we believe we must have been to justify who we are.
Now look forward. The future, too, is imagined—yet no less vivid. The same architecture of the brain that recalls the past also constructs possible futures. The hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the default mode network—all flicker to life when we anticipate. And what they create is not prophecy. It is simulation. We imagine a dinner party next week or a child we may have one day or the legacy we hope to leave. But these are dreams, no more real than the myths of Homer—crafted from the raw material of memory and desire.
We humans are time-binders, as Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski called us. But we bind time not as it is—but as we wish it to be.
This dual invention—of past and future—places us on a tightrope above the infinite. It is only the present, the moment of being, that is ever truly real. But how brief that moment is. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has told us that even our perception of the present is slightly delayed. Our senses arrive not all at once but in sequence. The brain waits—perhaps a tenth of a second—to gather the full picture before announcing: “This is now.”
Time is not a track we move along. It is a field we cultivate.
And yet it is that small “now” in which all reality resides. It is in the present that we touch, that we breathe, that we think. It is in the present that a child laughs, that a truth is spoken, that an idea is born. The past is gone. The future is not yet. But the present—the only time we can act—is ours.
It is astonishing that this insight, as modern as quantum physics, is also as ancient as the Upanishads. “Yesterday is but a dream,” the Sanskrit poets wrote, “and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.”
Yet we struggle to inhabit this now. The mind resists it. The self—our sense of self—is itself a construction stretched across time. It is a narrative, told in chapters and revisions, that gives coherence to the moment. But it too is fiction. There is no continuous “I” moving through time, only a series of selves, each suspended in its own present, like beads on a string.
This is not a cause for despair. It is a call to freedom.
The most dangerous lies are those we tell ourselves without knowing. But the most powerful truths are those we create with intention. Narrative therapy teaches patients to reframe their history. Nations, too, are beginning to reframe their myths—to tell more inclusive stories, more honest ones. These are acts not of deception but of liberation.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that many traditions are “invented”—not discovered but composed. And yet they give us meaning. The same is true of memory, and of hope. They are not scaffolds of iron but sculptures of clay.
Time, then, is not a track we move along. It is a field we cultivate. And in that field, the present is not a fleeting moment to be endured on the way to somewhere else—it is the only soil from which meaning can grow.
Einstein wrote, in a letter to a grieving widow, that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He meant it not as a physicist, but as a human being. He meant that comfort lies not in the unreality of time, but in the reality of the now.
Let us not waste that moment. Let us not trade it for the ghosts of what was or the fantasies of what might be. We ascend not by living in imagined times—but by being fully alive in this one. 
Lead image: andrey_l / Shutterstock
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John Steele
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John Steele is the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus.
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