Abstract: A contrast between the settled past and the open future is essential to deliberation, free agency, and our basic conception of time and change. Metaphors—e.g., time as a garden of forking paths—gesture at the contrast, but an accurate and precise account of it is yet to be produced. I identify two topics, giving accounts of which is sufficient to give an account of the nature of openness:
• The temporal asymmetry of openness, and
• The connection between openness and possibility .
I claim we may adequately address both in a philosophically modest and non-revisionary way, using the notion of chance.