“The patterns are the events. Would you agree the summer of ’19 continues to fade ever further into the past? Which is all I’m saying. That if we take the physical present as the point of reference and not the events, it is the events going from potential, to actual, to residual, future to past, rather than the point of the present moving past to future.”

Maybe the confusion is in the difference between objective and subjective theories of time. Subjectively, I can see the mismatch between the conscious self that seems to move forward in time, and the events flowing into our past, relative to the present moment that’s defined by our conscious awareness of our being distinct from our memories.

But objectively, I’m not sure this temporal bidirectionality makes sense. Does the summer of 1919 objectively recede further and further into the past, or is that deepening of the past a trick of memory? Sure, the past days keep piling up, but that recalls the mound of sand analogy. The past keeps getting bigger and bigger, as it were, but that’s not the same as a furthering of the future’s flow into the past.

More and more events happen as time moves on, but they happen objectively from past causes to future effects. The events themselves don’t come from the future, assuming the future isn’t fixed. But subjectively, events do seem to flow into the past, which I’d explain by saying that once an event is recognized it enters our memory. So there’s a difference between an event sliding into the past and an event sliding into our memory.