What do you think about most of the time?
 
This is not a question about your secret longings or an attempt to ferret your impure dreams. It is simply an invitation to take a look at what your mind is often working on.
 
What do you ponder when you are walk alone, travel solo on a bus or train, or sit on a terrace, as I do daily, sipping a cup of tea? What are the thoughts that linger or float through your mind, when you are not seduced by a newspaper, your favorite television channel or the ever-present smart phone?
 
Of course, there is a great variety of things that pass through your mind and they change every day. What troubled or excited you last week may not be uppermost in your mind this week. Yet, while individual things that concern us change over time, are there categories of concern that do not change so much?
 
We know, for instance, that if something has happened to exasperate you – a colleague’s irritating remark in the office – it may rankle you. You may be thinking of strong ripostes you wish you had thought of at the time. Or, if you have recently lost a good friend, the pain of loss may return intermittently to your mind. You wish you had kept in closer touch with her before she went out of your life.
 
The common element in these instances is that they are in the past. If we take an inventory of our free-floating ideas, we will no doubt see examples of a review of past events. They may be joyful events, such as successes at work, painful experiences like a bereavement, or simply striking things that left an impression on our mind. We go over events that have occurred, see it from different angles and perhaps come up with new conclusions.

This has led many to think of such day-dreaming as quite pointless. The past, it is said, is the past, and you can do nothing about it. Do not waste time revisiting or ruing what you cannot change, let alone undo. Worse, by doing so, you take time and energy away from the current reality. By dwelling in the past, you abdicate the present and its challenges.
 
I have written myself of my experience of hiking in a picturesque trail for a half-hour and then realizing that I had seen nothing of the beauty around me. I was so preoccupied with persistent thoughts that I had let the world pass me by. In effect, I had walked blindfolded, a captive of my own speculation. Surely it is a loss if I can’t enjoy what is in front of me, so barred I am in the prison of my private ideas.
 
In his charming book, Present Moment Wonderful Moment, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We often become so busy that we forget what we are doing or even who we are.” We then walk, zombie-like, through life, without savoring life’s moveable feast: when we work, we long to get out; when we get out, we long to rest and relax; when we return home, we turn on the television without really caring what is unfolding on the screen. The people in our life march through, without contact, without receiving or leaving an imprint. The solution, Buddha would say, is to wake up from this torpor, focus on the present, in fact the very moment, and see what life has to offer. You may then find that there are indeed splendor in the grass and fireworks in the sky.
 
Now science is offering another interesting take. Despite the vast literature that trace our present discontents to past miseries, find the roots of our neuroses and psychoses in what has occurred before, recent studies suggest that what we think about most is the future. It seems we are forever prospecting what is to come, for we know instinctively that is how we can make our life better.
 
Psychology, for instance, has put a huge accent on uncovering our past as the way to understand our present quirks. We thought we can best counter depression by finding out and analyzing the sad things that have happened in one’s life. Some now think that depression is better seen as a gloomy world view, a dismal estimate of the future and its scenarios. So the therapy has to start by helping one to develop better future expectations rather than delve in past agonies.
 
Even learning has been seen as the repetition of past behavior, as modified by the present effort to avoid pain or receive a reward. This explains poorly the large bets people seem to make on their future plans, the enormous investment of sweat and money on the missionary zeal to achieve some result. Their focus is on future hopes and dreams, visions and accomplishments. Nothing shows our obsession with the future as much as the dedication of millions to the afterlife, for which not a shred of evidence has surfaced so far.

​Scientists are now telling us that our brains maintain the when, where and what of past events in different places, and the hippocampus pulls them up and combines them to let us view what has happened in our life. It combines and recombines them in different ways depending on what we are trying to do: solve a problem, understand what is obscure, get a sense of direction. In short, we are mining the past only to get a clue for the future.
 
Day dreaming then turns out to be, instead of a self-indulgent pastime, a very practical exercise. If your boss has put you on the carpet and acted rude, or your fiancée has taken a trifle and created a scene, you go over the incident more than once, in masochistic detail, only because you are rehearsing for an encore where you can come out with flying colors. You are doing exactly what companies are doing these days: gathering and analyzing ‘big’ data to come up with better strategies. When we seem to grovel in the past, we are really trying to stand up to the future.
 
I have never quite forgotten what my mother said about a girlfriend. Nor what the girlfriend said about a moustache I temporarily flaunted. Heaven knows I should have been more discriminating about girlfriends, and the moustache was admittedly an affectation I could have done without. My mind keeps recalling these unsavory episodes and will perhaps induce wiser counsel in future.
 
Tell me: What are you thinking about?

​Rob is certainly the handsomest old-timer among my friends. He walks erect, has a radiant face and an easy laugh. His brother, Ron, only two years older than him, could have been as impressive a figure as Rob. We will never know.
 
Ron would have been 87 now, but he did not reach that age. His life story came to a halt in April 1951 when he was just 21. Exactly how and why nobody knows.
 
Rob told me the story and stopped when the story ended. But it was really a story without an end. What makes it so excruciatingly painful is that it has no end.
 
His brother Ron was just twenty when, in a spurt of patriotic fervor, he joined the US Air Force. The year he wore uniform was also the year the US entered the Korean War.
 
During the Second World War, the allied forces liberated Korea, which had been under brutal Japanese rule for thirty-five years. The Soviet Union liberated the north, while US took over the south. The two regions had separate governments, and, as the Cold War heated, they turned hostile, each declaring the other an usurper. In June 1950 75,000 North Korean troops marched into the south and nearly brought it to heel. The UN declared it an invasion and the US entered the war to lead a multilateral force. Four months later, when US troops crossed the Yalu River in pursuit of northern soldiers, China entered the fray and the war turned vicious. Fortunes turned many times; Seoul changed hands four times. Through it all, the US conducted regular and massive bombing raids on the north.
 
A young recruit, Ron completed his training at Maxwell airbase with enthusiasm. He started participating in bombing raids, piloting fighter planes. He hated strafing raids; they required low-level flying and he could clearly see the people he was killing.

​He was on his 42nd mission at the beginning of April. He would get his leave on completion of fifty missions, and he was eager to complete the target. He longed for his girlfriend, Brenda, a childhood sweetheart he had promised to marry on return.
 
It was late afternoon when the assault team, the 17th Fighter-Bomber Group of 66th Squadron, met in the Suwon military airbase. Commander Dwayne Bosworth would lead and two other young pilots would fly on either side, while the youngest and rawest recruit, Ron, First Lieutenant, would bring up the rear. After the mandatory checks and the shortest briefing, the group was airborne. The sky was clear and they expected a quick arrival at the target area.
 
In less than two hours the group was over the target area of a military encampment seventy miles south of Pyongyang. It was still an hour from dusk and they could clearly see the camp they would hit.
 
The other three were flying faster F-82G Twin Mustangs. Ron was flying a well-used older plane, the single-engine fixed-wing F-51D Mustang night fighter. He was certainly the most vulnerable from anti-aircraft fire, but, given their mission, they were all vulnerable. On this occasion, there would be no suppression of anti-aircraft artillery and machine guns. These were days before precision guided weapons, and they had to fly low to hit their targets. Ron’s plane had been adjusted for a lower convergence point to reduce the risk of ground collision during a downward dive and to increase the firing time before pulling up. That and the additional armor underneath the cockpit and the engine were Ron’s only protection.

​The first two runs went well. On the third run the enemy fire was more pointed, and Bosworth’s plane took a minor hit and he ordered return to base. Three plans turned, but not Ron’s. He had been hit badly; they saw him going down.
 
The posse returned to Suwon and reported. A file was opened showing Ron as missing. Limited efforts were made to ascertain Ron’s fate, but he had gone down in enemy territory and intelligence was slow and scant. Little information came through in the second year, and the air force authorities declared him officially dead at the end of the year and started the procedure of essentially closing his file.
 
A lingering issue that remained in the minds of all who knew Ron. The posse members who had the last glimpse of Ron noticed his plane did not crash. It did not burn either. Ron somehow managed to land his damaged plane slowly and carefully on the ground. They saw no more. Based on the report, subsequent US pilots went over the ground more than once. They saw neither Ron’s plane on the ground nor Ron. The North Koreans were unlikely to have any interest in an old plane, to glean technological insights, when everybody was turning to jet planes. Its swift removal was mysterious. If the North Korean army captured Ron, there were never any sightings or reports from retrieved prisoners of war. Was he able to get away from his ruined plane and the Korean soldiers out to capture him? Did he successfully escape and find refuge somewhere?
 
Brenda, Ron’s fiancée, took it hard, waited five years, three years after the armistice was signed in July 1953 ending the war, then moved to another town and reportedly married a school teacher twenty-one years older.
 
Ron’s family waited anxiously for years, hoping to get some news that could bring them closure. They still wait.