Time Is a Moving Object
metaphor
Source: Embodied Experience → Time and Temporality
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguisticsphilosophy
From: Metaphors We Live By
Transfers
One of two complementary metaphors for temporal experience, and the one where the observer stands still. Time moves toward you from the future, passes you in the present, and recedes behind you into the past. You are stationary; time flows. Events approach, arrive, and depart like objects on a conveyor belt or a river current.
Key structural parallels:
- Approach — future events move toward the observer. “The deadline is approaching” treats a calendar date as an object closing distance. “The time will come” makes an abstract moment into something traveling toward you, arriving on its own schedule.
- Arrival — the present is the moment of contact. “The time has arrived” maps temporal now-ness onto physical proximity. The event reaches you. You don’t go to it.
- Passage — time moves past the observer. “Time flies” is the sensation of the current accelerating. “The hours crawled by” is the current slowing. The observer’s only role is to experience the speed of what passes.
- Recession — past events move away. “Those days are behind us” treats the past as objects receding into the distance. Memory is looking backward at things that have moved on.
- Flow — time has a direction and a current. “The flow of time,” “the stream of consciousness.” The metaphor imposes unidirectionality: time moves in one direction, and you cannot swim upstream.
Limits
- The observer is not passive — the metaphor makes the experiencer of time into a bystander. Time happens to you. This understates human agency: we make decisions, set deadlines, and structure our experience of duration. The moving-object frame erases the active role we play in how time feels.
- Time doesn’t actually move — the metaphor is so natural that it takes effort to notice: nothing is literally approaching or receding. “The deadline is approaching” sounds like a description, but the deadline is a fixed date on a calendar. We are moving toward it (see the complementary metaphor, TIME IS STATIONARY AND WE MOVE THROUGH IT).
- Speed variation is unexplained — “time flies” and “time crawls” describe subjective experience accurately, but the moving-object frame offers no mechanism for why the object changes speed. If time is a river, what makes it rush or stagnate? The metaphor describes but doesn’t explain.
- The frame obscures simultaneity — moving objects are sequential; they pass one at a time. The metaphor makes it hard to think about overlapping durations, parallel processes, or the way multiple timescales interact. Time-as-object is single-threaded.
- Future as approaching threat — the metaphor gives the future an ominous quality. Things “loom” and “bear down.” The approaching-object frame makes future events feel like things that will hit you, which produces anxiety about events that may never arrive.
Expressions
- “The time will come when…” — a future moment traveling toward the present
- “The time for action has arrived” — the moment reaching the observer, making contact
- “Time flies when you’re having fun” — the moving object accelerating, perceived speed as pleasure
- “The hours dragged by” — the object decelerating, slowness as tedium
- “The deadline is approaching” — a calendar date closing distance like an oncoming vehicle
- “Those days are long gone” — past events receded to a great distance
- “Time marches on” — relentless forward movement, military cadence applied to duration
- “In the weeks ahead” — future time as objects positioned in front, not yet arrived
- “The moment passed” — a temporal instant moving past the observer, now behind them
Origin Story
Lakoff and Johnson discuss TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT alongside its complement (TIME IS STATIONARY AND WE MOVE THROUGH IT) as a case study in how two contradictory metaphors can coexist without conflict. English speakers switch between them constantly, often in the same conversation. “The weeks ahead” (time-moving) and “as we go through the years” (ego-moving) use incompatible spatial schemas, but no one notices the contradiction because both are grounded in the same embodied experience of motion and sequence.
The two metaphors correspond to what cognitive scientists later formalized as the “time-moving” and “ego-moving” frames (Gentner et al., 2002). The ambiguous question “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days — what day is it now?” reliably splits respondents: time-moving thinkers say Monday, ego-moving thinkers say Friday.
References
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 9
- Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. “As Time Goes By: Evidence for Two Systems in Processing Space-Time Metaphors” (2002) — experimental disambiguation of time-moving and ego-moving frames
- Boroditsky, L. “Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time Through Spatial Metaphors” (2000) — cross-linguistic evidence for motion metaphors of time
Related Entries
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Linear Scales Are Paths (journeys/metaphor)
- Long-Term Purposeful Activity Is a Journey (journeys/metaphor)
- Long-Term Purposeful Change Is a Journey (journeys/metaphor)
- Means of Change Is Path over Which Motion Occurs (journeys/metaphor)
- The Progress of External Events Is Forward Motion (journeys/metaphor)
- Time Is Movement (movement/metaphor)
- Holy Grail (mythology/metaphor)
- Love Is A Journey (journeys/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: pathforcenear-far
Relations: causetransform
Structure: pipeline Level: primitive
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner, fshot