Time Isn't Up

My time is up.

I don’t mean that literally—hopefully. I’m thinking about that phrase and what it really means. Of course, it’s usually said to signify the end of a life. But in a deeper sense, it’s a multilayered description not just of death, but of time itself. Because the way we understand time is inseparable from the cycle of life.

In cosmic terms, we think the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. We say it was “born” at the Big Bang. The Milky Way is a bit younger—about 13.6 billion years old. These numbers are derived from measurements based on the Earth’s movement around the Sun, just as we measure our own lives: in days, seasons, calendars. In this way, time feels intuitive. But it’s also a contrivance.

Time is a mystery that has confounded poets, philosophers, and physicists alike. It’s an abstraction we can only comprehend through what we can measure—planetary movements, seasonal cycles, the arc from birth to death. Time, for us, is inseparable from the instruments used to capture it. We think of it as a clock. But that’s like saying a ruler is space. It’s not. Still, time becomes real to us only through measurement, as units we construct—past, present, future. In this way, time exists only in the mind.

The deeper reality is that even after we die, we continue to exist—just not in living form. Our atoms, molecules, chemical and mineral elements, don’t cease to exist. Only consciousness ends, as far as we know. So saying “my time is up” is accurate only in the sense that the mind—our internal clock—is no longer functioning. Time, as a construct, ends when the mind does. But the body never disappears. It simply changes form. It becomes part of something else.

The implication, then, is that time doesn’t actually exist. But space does. Time isn’t 'up' or down—it’s not anywhere. It can’t be located. Even Einstein’s notion of spacetime—brilliant as it was in showing their interdependence—still leans on the mind’s need to make time legible through space. But really, it may all be space. And what we call “time” might just be our way of experiencing movement through it.

Bob Dylan titled a 1997 album Time Out of Mind. (No relation to the catchy Steely Dan song of the same name.) Tellingly, the album includes no track with that title. The songs circle themes of lost love, alienation, and mortality. But maybe the phrase points to something deeper. Maybe Dylan, as he so often does, stumbled into a kind of accidental truth. Because what is death, if not time falling out of mind?