Due to the unidirectional nature of time, the present is always necessary. Logically, it is the consequence of past events, while the future is a set of unpredictable, possibly probable possibilities of actions in the here and now. Our entire life is, after all, a kind of historical existence. In his book Against Progress, Slavoj Žižek writes from a quantum mechanical perspective: “When the wave function collapses, the other possible superpositions do not simply disappear, but leave their mark on the single reality that emerges.”
Every historical event that ultimately comes to pass carries within it the conditional possibility that it could have been different. The past we leave behind sometimes reappears before us with a strange curvature of space. The forgotten, forgotten story, the postponed attention, the turning away, the unfinished work leaves traces just as much as active action. As we look ahead, a special part of our consciousness still reserves for itself what we have turned our backs on, and in the darkness, trees slowly sprout from it, like from the overgrown soil of an abandoned garden.