Pain And The Present Moment

The present moment is the only time in which one can actively reflect, and by the time one has focused on the present moment, it has already given way to a new moment.  This makes it the only time in which one can suffer, or feel joy, or experience peace.  There is no other time in which one can feel happiness or dread or despair.  Even for people who have not realized such things, or who have thought about them only on the basis of making assumptions rather than looking to reason's necessary truths and absolute certainty, it remains true that pain is so difficult in part precisely because one is in the midst of it as long as it persists.  Any future moment where one will be free of it or in less turmoil is still future.

Of course, one's experience is always of one present moment being replaced by another, so any lifetime up to any hypothetically enormous length is not the prolonged experience of one single moment.  It is the experience of a chain of moments, the only one to be "here" at a given point being whichever is present.  Presentism is false.  There by logical necessity could not be only the present moment because, even if all a being's memories are illusory because they were created in the very moment they are perceiving with misleading memory evidences (an entirely possible but unverifiable thing), that present moment has already gone to the past in the same duration it takes to shift their focus to it.

A person does not escape anything more than the moments that were once the present, though.  Mental states like emotions can certainly last from moment to moment.  To even maintain concentration regarding anything requires that some sort of mental state has not dissipated or changed entirely across time.  As long as one exists in time, the very continuation of one's existence means another once-future moment—if a moment was going to elapse, it was always true that it was going to be so—has reached the present and one has experience within this.  This is why it is possible for people to feel trapped or overwhelmed across great periods of time: individual moments come and go and yet their suffering still exists as a mental experience.

To focus on the present is to concentrate on what is incredibly fleeting.  All the same, it is the only way to fully face one's own mind in active introspection rather than passive experience.  The present is the only time one can actually experience trials in, for any past times one has suffered in were once present and any times one will eventually suffer in have not yet arrived.  In the present, however, there is no immediate partaking in the hopeful relief to come.  There is the pain directly at hand.  If suffering seems like it will come to an end at some point, enduring the "right now" can be personally desirable, subjectively fulfilling, even.  It is when the pain seems constantly unrelenting or lesser than the relief or joy of the future (which cannot be known to await one since the future has not happened yet) that extreme despair might set in.