Apparently, in medieval times, the general consensus (among the few who thought about it), was that time was an illusion; the only reality , as they saw it, is now (or was now, I suppose, if one allows that these people lived in a past which isn’t any longer) which leads me, as I think about it, to assume it’s reasonable to find ‘now’ the only reality, since nothing has yet to come next.
Setting aside the manufactured ‘time’ we’ve come to accept which divides nature’s cycles into seconds, minutes and hours, ‘just now’ or ‘in a bit’ can be interpreted as ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ or even ‘a year ago’ or a ‘year from now’ if the events considered (think galactic distances and the speed of light) warrant such interpretation.
Then there’s the psychological aspect. Sometimes I find time passing rapidly, you know, when I’m engaged in a particularly interesting enterprise and other times time seems to slither along at a snail’s pace when, for instance, I’m a captive audience, trapped before an expounding orator which may have me thinking about what ‘eternity is now’ really means.
Anyway, this all has me thinking I needn’t care so much about late or early anymore.
