1.

Fill in the missing words:

 Very many of us suffer from a peculiar-sounding problem: an ___________
properly to inhabit the stretch of time we call ‘the present’. Maybe we’re on
a beautiful beach on a sunny day, the sky is azure and the palm trees slender
and implausibly __________, but most of ‘us’ isn’t actually here at all.
 It’s somewhere at work or in imaginary discussion with a rival or plotting a
new enterprise. Or maybe we’re at the birthday of a child: it’s enormously
significant for her and we love her dearly, but we are elsewhere.
 Our body is _________ in the 'now', but our minds are skipping to points in
both the future and the past. What is it that makes the present, especially the
nicer moments of the present, so difficult to experience properly?
 And why, conversely, can so many _______ feel easier to enjoy, appreciate
and perceive when they are firmly over? One benefit of the past is that it is a
dramatically foreshortened, edited version of the present.
 Even the best days of our lives contain a range of dull and uncomfortable
moments. But in memory, like skilled editors of hours of raw and often
uninspired footage, we can lock on to the most ___________ moments; and
therefore construct sequences that feel a great deal more meaningful and
interesting than the settings that generated them.
 Hours of mediocrity can be reduced to five or six perfect images.
__________ is the present enhanced by an editing machine. Much of what
ruins the present is sheer anxiety. The present always contains an enormous
number of possibilities, some hugely ________, which we are constantly
aware of.
 Anything could theoretically happen, an earthquake, an aneurysm, a
rejection –which gives rise to a non-specific anxiety that trails around us
most of the time: the simple dread at the unknownness of what is to come.
 But then, of course, only a very limited range of awful things do ever come
to pass, and we forget the anxiety at once (or, rather, shift it to the new
present). So when we remember an event, what we leave out of it is how
much of that event we actually spent anticipating an ________ future that
never came.
 Our bodies further contribute to our distraction from the present. They have
their own moods and itineraries. They might feel tired and ________ at just
the moment when the landscape around us would demand grandeur and
confidence.
 But these dissonant moods also get edited out of memory. We’ll remember
the view over the ocean far longer than the slight queasiness which _______
us in on ourselves at the time.
 Our minds are cavernous, ________ places. So much courses through them
that has little to do with what is right in front of our eyes. We can end up
seeming ungrateful to where we are.
 Someone is telling us an important story, and not from any evil ________,
just from the difficulty of having to manage the entity called ‘I’, we digest
some regret or other instead.
 We are at a beautiful location, but we can barely take in the vegetation and
the extraordinary views. So fixated are we on an event that will only occur in
six months' time. We need to be prepared for the weird way in which we
_________ with the world, and not berate ourselves unduly for our
difficulties at doing justice to where our bodies and minds happen to be.
 We should be ready for this disloyalty in other people, too – at moments
when they look strangely worried at a party we’ve _________ on, or don’t
seem to be listening to a story we're telling them.
 They, too, may just be experiencing some of the major difficulties of being
in the present. Like us, they’ll probably enjoy our ____________ with us so
much more when the present has safely given way to memory.
2. Write a short summary for the audio: