CHAINS OF TIME
NOVEMBER 30, 2014
Do you have certain things you decided so strongly so long ago that you don’t even quite remember why?
Early in my life, I wiped watches from my life. I remember being a little girl and loving a necklace watch. But whenever I wore any watch, I somehow lost it. Ultimately, timepieces and I abandoned each other. I became the teen and then grown-up who refused to wear watches.
It may initially have had to do with me not wanting to stress so much about getting places or doing things in time, on time. Even then, I sensed it took me out of what I was actually doing. I mean, there were clocks in cars, on buildings, pretty much everywhere, church bells ringing out the hourly time, musicians keeping time with regular rhythms, and the position of the sun providing a more general sense of where we were in the day. I remember that when I was a young teen, a girl in my grade had a knack for accumulating watches – actually, a compulsion to steal them in mass quantities. The last I heard of it was rumors of helicopters over a shopping mall as she was arrested for shoplifting.
This anti-watch thing of mine stuck through my young adulthood, career deadlines, motherhood carpool detail, and other punctuality-demanding responsibilities. And in these non-watch-wearing years, I’ve learned a thing or two about timekeeping.
As history shows, people have found ways to track time for thousands of years. Nature gives us dawn, dusk, the sun, moon, roosters at dawn, owls at night, the ocean tides, and our own internal clocks. The ancient Egyptians constructed huge obelisks to help them further chart the passing of time and created sundials which divided the day into hours. The Muslims further developed sundials. Hour glasses appeared in paintings as early as the 14th century. And then came clocks of all kinds, shapes, and sounds, even nature-simulating rooster and cuckoo clocks. Leonard da Vinci developed possibly the first alarm clock. Watches were named after an Old English term for watchmen marking the duration of their shifts. Time marched on with the developing popularity of very early mobile devices aka pendant watches, then pocket-watches, and finally wrist-watches which emerged in the 16th century. Queen Elizabeth 1 was given a wrist-watch as a present by Robert Dudley in 1571.
This idea of giving a wristwatch as a romantic gift had legs. Four centuries later, my father gave my mother two wristwatches, one was for their engagement and the other he had made for an occasion. After my mom died at age 57 of lung cancer, my father gave them to me because my wrists were tiny as hers had been. These watches are both unique, lovely, and sentimental. So I tried to break my anti-watch strike and wear them. But I never did wear them.
As I’m writing about it now, I have this sudden realization that maybe my dad giving my mom watches was a ticking piece of my initial teen rebellion against them. Maybe it had something to do with my adolescent rebellion against material representations of romantic love.
But even the recent smart watches, ones that measure calories, steps, or stress levels, did not tick for me. However, finally, last year, I fell in watch-love. I saw a simple black and white watch at a Harvard Medical School meditation and psychotherapy workshop where renowned meditation teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh spoke. Booths featured his books, calligraphy, and watches. His watches don’t have numbers, just Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful calligraphy and English cursive saying: ‘now it’s now’. It was the right time for me. My Thich Nhat Hanh watch stayed in my closet for a bit. Then, one day, I hung it in my office. It greets me when I come in to work. It reminds me to enjoy the moment.