Chasing the second hand: making the most of our precious time
Exploring the elasticity of time through the complications of clocks
Time is complicated
Fragile and flexible. Time is both here and there. In front and behind. Seen and unseen. Felt and not felt. It’s complicated.
Did you know the tiny little gears and cogs inside any timepiece are called complications? Any feature beyond the simple display of hours and minutes is a complication.
A timepiece displaying only hours and minutes is known as a simple movement. Common complications in watches are day and date displays, alarms, chronographs and automatic winding mechanisms.
The more complications in a watch, the more difficult it is to design, create, assemble and repair. A typical date-display chronograph may have up to 250 parts, while a particularly complex watch may have a thousand or more parts. Watches with several complications are referred to as grandes complications.
Our grandes complications
Life should be a simple movement. We know life starts and that it ends. And as our lives progress, time moves and passes, and we age, marked by our birthdays.
But life is not just this simple movement. We have many grandes complications of our own to deal with, too.
Our lives are made up of an ∞infinite∞ number of parts. We are always trying to balance many complications. Unlike a clock mechanism, our brains do not just track time from point A to point B, because we also can reflect back to the past (-P) and also jump ahead to the future (+F).
Dates determine when we do something and mark time with substance and meaning. We are born on a certain date. Our first day of school takes place on a certain date. We get married on a certain date. We become a parent on a certain date. We die on a certain date. So many notable dates are etched into our history, and will be in our future, too.
Similar to some clocks and watches, we also have to contend with alarms. But unlike timepieces, we often have to deal with a million type of different alarms, all going off at the same time. ‘We’re supposed to be earning this much money by this age’. ‘I’m meant to be in this job by this age’. ‘You need to have children by this age’.
There are occasions then, when we need to take the time to try to find moments of silence away from all this noise, to contemplate, to plan a way through these complications, and to be grateful for what we have.
A one way track
As our own lives, full to the brim with these grandes complications, progress, our own automatic winding mechanisms begin to function less well. Things begin to become harder to do – we get tired, we get ill, and start to creak and crack and break.
We need to take time to charge our own batteries, but time is a commodity hard to purchase. Life is always busy and often only keeps on getting busier and busier.
Time becomes so precious. And the very balance and calculation of time comes down to so many precise and personal complications.
But despite the array of mechanisms hidden inside our watches and clocks, time can still appear to bend and flex and skew. Yet time always run straight – we can set it by our watches. One second will follow the next. Always.
But life is an illusion that plays with the notion of time. What we do, when we do it, and how we feel, makes time appear to behave in different ways. Whether we’re happy or sad, busy or resting, five or fifty-five, time tricks us into believing it runs in rivers of different speeds.
How impossibly complicated does this make things, when nothing is ever just a simple movement?
Make every second count
We all have to treasure time. Our time alone, our time with the ones we love. We can’t bury time and save it for later. We need to make the most of every second we can.
Try to live for the moment. Although time never stops, our time does. Our cogs and mechanisms age, corrode, get oiled and repaired as much as they can, but there is a limit. A well-made, much-loved and lucky timepiece can live a long life. Alternatively, an unlucky timepiece might not.
There will always come a time when changing the batteries or winding up the watch stops working. It is going to happen to us all. We rarely know when this is going to happen. But it will.
Make your life count. Scratch the watch face, bend some springs, run thin a few cogs. A life is there to be lived.
And much like how a well-worn watch becomes a record of events we have been through, every scratch and scar, broken bone and broken heart, becomes a record that we too have lived.
So make your life complicated. Live through these grandes complications and see them as challenges to conquer. Make memories that will live on forever through the people you touch. Make every tick of the second hand count, before the clock finally stops.
