There are many fictional as well as actual examples of people who get stuck in the past and won't or can't move on. There is Miss Havisham In Dickens' "Great Expectations". She was jilted on her wedding day and spends the rest of her life stuck in time on that day, insulted and angry at what has happened, and with a particular "axe to grind" with men. Her venomous hatred towards men fuels the events and the course of the story. Then there was Queen Victoria, not too distant in time from the fictional Miss Havisham. Ah those Victorian women! How they loved to mourn! But Queen Victoria's many years of mourning after her husband died were certainly less fuelled by anger and more by grief, with some possible "survivor's guilt" thrown into the mix. After all, why should you live if your spouse has met with an early death? A Hindu woman might traditionally have been expected to jump into the flaming funeral pyre of her dead husband. Chinese emperors supposedly took out their courtiers and personal servants with them at their death.

You are looking at cultural and personal attitudes here that worship death because they worship the past. There is an unwritten but accepted rule that enjoying the present is taboo. That is not to deny the sorrow and grief experienced at the death of a loved one. But it is interesting to observe how much of that grief is tinged with guilt at still being alive. It would be quite easy to go to that mindset. None of us is free of guilt. And guilt is one of the biggest inhibitors to living in the present. Self judgement gets in the way.You often also mourn the passing of a joyful experience rather than celebrating its completion. You don't then give yourself the right to enjoy the moment.

So where does such a self judgement come from? Sometimes it's easy to trace it back to family patterns and experiences growing up. But these seeming origins in this life go back to karmic patterns from other lifetimes, the things you have done which you don't forgive yourself for. You come back to punishing circumstances in this lifetime which you can continue to create and attract throughout, at least until you become aware of their roots and can gradually work on making changes. Awareness is key here. Remember Krishnamurti's statement: "Awareness of a problem brings about its own mutation." I keep reminding myself that no matter what I did earlier on in my life, or, for that matter, what I did in any other lifetime, I am not doing it now. Most of what you judge yourself for, you are not actually doing now. So live with now! If you do something you are ashamed of, you can correct it. But you don't need to keep correcting the things you're not doing now.

There is a Nasrudin story that tells of Nasrudin boxing a boy's ear before sending the boy to get a bucket of water. Why? Because Nasrudin thought it better to box the kid's ears before he dropped the bucket of water, just in case he did, or so that he wouldn't. The perverse logic of this story is its teaching device. Don't keep boxing your ears for things you might do. That's insanity!

Living in the future is even more insane because where you are right now neither gives you the tools, nor the experience that you will have down the way, when the future becomes the present and you are actually facing whatever it is that you were worrying about. Don't cross your bridges until you get to them because you probably don't even know where the bridges are yet. And even if you do know, you still do not really know the lay of the land around the bridge or what the crossing will feel like when you get there. Living in the future is based on fear. Living in the past is based on anger and guilt. So why not stick with the present? It's much simpler and easier!