Against the Flow of Time

Few metaphors have proven more seductive — or more misleading — than the idea that time “flows.” It is everywhere in our language: we speak of time rushing by, slipping through our fingers, carrying us forward like a current. Physics too has borrowed the trope, smuggling it into accounts of cosmology and thermodynamics. Yet “the flow of time” is a metaphor that corrodes understanding rather than clarifies it.

To imagine time flowing is to imagine it as a substance, a thing that moves. But what moves? Not events themselves: they occur. Not clocks: they measure. Not space: it does not carry us anywhere. The idea that time “flows” amounts to the conflation of temporal ordering with spatial displacement. It is to smuggle in space by the back door of metaphor, projecting movement into what is nothing but the constitutive condition of succession.

From a relational perspective, the error is stark. Time is not something that flows; it is the ordering potential of actualisation. The present is not “carried along” by a current, but constituted in the cut from potential to event. Nothing moves forward; rather, actuality keeps emerging.

The metaphor of flow is so entrenched that it hides in plain sight, as if it were neutral description. But it is not. It subtly commits us to a picture in which time is an external stream, into which events are dropped like pebbles. Relationally, this is backwards. Events are primary; ordering is emergent.

The result is simple, if blunt:

Time does not flow — events occur.