Time Is Movement

Transfers

The passage of time is understood through physical movement so pervasively that English has almost no way to discuss temporality without motion vocabulary. Time flows, flies, crawls, marches on, drags, races, stands still. The metaphor is not a single mapping but a family of related ones that share the same source domain.

Two major variants coexist, noted by Lakoff and Johnson:

• Moving-time — time is the mover, the observer is stationary. “The weeks flew by.” “Christmas is approaching.” “The deadline is coming up.” Time moves toward and past the observer along a path. The future is ahead, the past is behind.
• Moving-observer — the observer moves through time, which is stationary. “We’re coming up on the deadline.” “She’s approaching retirement.” “We’ve left those problems behind us.” The person travels a temporal landscape.

Key structural parallels:

• Speed — time moves at variable rates. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” “The afternoon dragged.” Speed maps subjective temporal experience onto a physical sensation everyone understands. A boring meeting is slow movement; an exciting event is fast.
• Path and direction — time has a direction (forward) and deviation from it is abnormal. “Moving forward” is progress; “going backward” is regression. “We need to move past this” treats an emotional event as a location on a path the observer must traverse.
• Proximity — nearness in space is nearness in time. “The close future.” “The distant past.” “We’re a long way from a solution.” The spatial logic of near and far structures how urgency and relevance are experienced.
• Obstacles — impediments on a path become temporal impediments. “We hit a roadblock.” “The project stalled.” “Nothing is standing in our way.” Delay is being blocked on a path; progress is moving freely.

Limits

• Time cannot stop or reverse — the movement frame implies a mover that can halt, turn around, or take a detour. Time permits none of these. “Turning back the clock” is always recognized as impossible or at least figurative, yet the metaphor continually invites the inference. Nostalgia and regret borrow heavily from the reversal structure that the source domain offers but the target domain forbids.
• No destination — movement is typically purposeful: you move toward something. Time has no inherent destination, yet the metaphor makes temporal experience feel teleological. “Where is this all heading?” treats the future as a place with content, when it is actually indeterminate. This can produce false comfort (things are heading somewhere good) or false dread (things are heading somewhere bad) from what is actually open-ended.
• The two variants contradict each other — in moving-time, the observer is stationary and time approaches. In moving-observer, the observer travels and time is the landscape. These are incompatible spatial configurations, yet speakers switch between them freely, sometimes in the same sentence. The metaphor is not a consistent model of time; it is a toolkit of ad hoc spatial framings.
• Cultural variation — the forward-future / backward-past orientation is not universal. Aymara speakers gesture forward for the past (which is known, hence visible) and backward for the future (which is unknown, hence behind). Mandarin uses vertical metaphors (earlier is “up,” later is “down”). The movement metaphor encodes a culturally specific spatial orientation as if it were a fact about time itself.

Expressions

• “Time flies” — speed of movement as subjective temporal compression
• “The weeks crawled by” — slow movement as tedious duration
• “We’re approaching the deadline” — moving-observer variant, destination as temporal event
• “The future is coming” — moving-time variant, time as approaching entity
• “We need to move forward” — progress as forward spatial displacement
• “Let’s not go backward on this” — regression as spatial reversal
• “That’s behind us now” — past events as locations already traversed
• “A long way off” — temporal distance as spatial distance
• “We’ve hit a roadblock” — temporal delay as spatial obstruction
• “The march of time” — time as a column of soldiers advancing inexorably

Origin Story

TIME IS MOVEMENT is one of Lakoff and Johnson’s primary metaphors — grounded directly in the bodily correlation between spatial displacement and temporal experience. Infants learn that moving from A to B takes time; the correlation between distance traversed and duration elapsed becomes the cognitive foundation for understanding time through movement.

The Glasgow Mapping Metaphor database documents the historical depth of this connection in English, showing movement-to-time vocabulary transfers from Old English onward. Words like “pass” (from Latin passus, a step), “run” (as in “the clock is running”), and “course” (from Latin cursus, a running) have been doing double duty in spatial and temporal domains for centuries.

The philosophical significance was recognized long before CMT. Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will, 1889) argued that spatializing time — treating duration as a line that can be divided into segments — distorts the lived experience of temporality. Heidegger made similar complaints. The metaphor theorists’ contribution was showing that this spatialization is not a philosophical choice but a deep linguistic habit embedded in the grammar of everyday speech.

References

• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980) — foundational treatment of time-as-motion metaphors
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — extended analysis of the moving-time and moving-observer variants
• Nunez, R. & Sweetser, E. “With the Future Behind Them,” Cognitive Science 30.3 (2006) — Aymara speakers’ reversed temporal orientation
• Boroditsky, L. “Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time through Spatial Metaphors,” Cognition 75.1 (2000) — experimental evidence for the cognitive reality of time-as-motion mappings
• Anderson, W., Bramwell, E. & Hough, C. Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus (2015) — historical vocabulary transfers between movement and time domains in English