The future does not lie ahead of us like some unexplored land, separated from the present by a sharp boundary line, but rather we live continually in a border region which belongs as much to the future as to the present. All theories which locate the essence of human spirit in the will simply say that spiritual existence projects out beyond its narrow present, so to speak, that the future is already reality within it. … Time is life seen apart from its contents, because life alone transcends the atemporal present of every other kind of reality in both directions and thereby realizes, all by itself, the temporal dimension, that is, time.

DEFINE: Ortega y Gasset redefines time as an achievement of life itself, not a container that reality occupies — a distinctive conceptual framework.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 808