Is it possible for time to "flow" without a container? When I think of flow, I think of something flowing through or past something else, such as a river flowing through some kind of landscape. In this example, the landscape would seem to be the container, while the river is the thing that flows. However, I can also imagine flow to occur in relationship to a past state of affairs, so that time may be measured in terms of the relationship between the present and the past. This concept of time most closely resembles the idea that time is change in and of itself, without any sort of container. However, does the past in this model constitute a sort of container, insofar as it is a point of reference? This concept of time seems supportive of the growing past theory of time, since it utilizes the past to make sense of the present. I cannot think how time could be considered in terms of flow from a presentist point of view, due to the lack of reference or container.

In the first analogy, involving the river flowing through a landscape, would time be represented by the container, or the thing that flows, or the relationship between the two?