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Your question is actually good! @Vastmind

A practice of being present is sometimes experienced in Buddhist circles as a balanced serpentine wander along the upright edge of a razor blade. The blade edge represents being present with either side of that edge possibly being the past or the future. Our measurement of success at being present can be described as how quickly we turn our wandering back over that blade edge each time one finds oneself off it. Where one person might only occasionally pass perpendicularly across that blade, a meditative adept spends more & more of their time upon that edge as they balance back and forth across it in the constantly correcting wiggle of a tightrope walker. As the practice of being present progresses, those corrections become less erratic and more instinctive. The time one might of spent in measuring such things, simply gets diverted into a quicker course correction. Here no mentality need hinders its actuality.

Some less severe views of a practice of being present, and one of my favorites, counter warn the meditator, to not end up becoming like a cat watching a mousehole.
In my meditative practice of being present, just not actively supporting deliberate thought has been one of the best helps for me.

The moment is a purely subjective value, not measurable by objective means. As such, its parameters are almost arbitrary. If I happen to be washing dishes, I generally seem to regard the time spent on that task as a single moment - though I've amused myself at times by breaking it down further into time spent scrubbing one plate, that has seemed an unnecessary refinement. The objective for me is just to avoid thinking about all the other tasks that need doing and to focus on just the one.

Fun fact. The faster one moves through space, the slower they move through time. That difference is imperceptible to us at our scales of movement. For a photon, moving at the speed of light though, time does not pass. It is always just now. The light from that star you're looking at that took 100s of years to get here, to the photon it just left, or it never left, or something.

The present can only be experienced. Trying to conceptualize it is like trying to grab water, it just slips out of your fingers. I've had fun in the past trying to work it out, but I've forgotten all the stuff.

You can think of it as a wave which is always transforming the future into the past, and the only place that is real on the entire wave is the leading edge where the transformation happens. The closer you can get to that edge, the more present you are…

Experimentation is called for. I propose a momentary length of two seconds, the first of which being the present moment itself, and the second being the transitional period going into the next moment.

From a language POV…I grew up using the word shame as a description of OTHERS guilt, not necessarily a different word…just a location difference, haha. Here or there.

For example, when I perform an action, if an icky bad feeling arises, I recognize it as the feeling we call guilt……If I see/notice another person do something that in my opinion they should feel guilt, but they appear not to…I say “ that person has no shame, I swear”.

Or…” they did such and such, and bec they felt shamed or shame, they tried to make it up to me or make things right with the group.” Or…I feel guilty bec I think I might have shamed him too hard

I learned at an early age that self loathing and self hatred solves nothing and becomes mental poison very quickly and does serious long term damage. Guilt is healthy emotion/feeling and should be used as a signal for some kind of change in that situation.

Understanding that all people make mistakes and you just have to take accountability, adjust accordingly and move on….And knowing that…flows into compassion for forgiving others for their mistakes.

These are two emotions that are similar but have a meaningful distinction. Guilt is the feeling that we've done something wrong, bad, hurtful, etc. and want to correct or make it better. Shame is the feeling that we've done something wrong, bad, hurtful, etc. because we're wrong, bad, hurtful. Guilt promotes improvement, shame locks us into defeat.

A short 24 second clip
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx-rJNmjDA5nvQ0uZtaBxhSnS6OR_XbrVA?si=2pfgZS-yCr3GF20K

https://brenebrown.com/articles/2013/01/15/shame-v-guilt/

Two major components of certain religious movements are Shame and Guilt.
They are used to keep people down, subservient to the religious "leaders" or justify violence against the "others".
On an individual level, Guilt and Shame are quite destructive. Yes , they can be turned into potentially constructive tools, they are ultimately unbearable weights carried uselessly upon one's shoulders.
Buddhism tells us to discard these boulders. Instead, replace them with ever growing compassion, empathy , courage and love for self and others.

While it’s true that they can be destructive, in their natural form they can be helpful. Without anyone providing any weight to them, they are the natural reminders that our feelings provide when we’ve done something “wrong”. Of course, when other people start to play on them, be they priests or parents, these emotions can go very wrong.

I remember once reading in a Tibetan Buddhist text that shame is the most useful of the emotions, and that someone who no longer feels any shame can’t be trusted. So perhaps non-Christian cultures look differently on shame and guilt than those who have the concept of Original Sin thrust at them at an early age (a fate I luckily avoided).

I believe that these feelings are there to be set right, not to be ignored. If you feel ashamed of something you’ve done, or guilty about something, set about righting the balance and making your heart clean again.

A story about emotion (and shame, and forgiveness, and what came after)