The Watch

On Paying Attention

This is the third essay in a series of 4 on the subject of attention. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have writing it. If you are interested, the other three:

• Where We Live - About seeing a place

• Bruton - About seeing people

• Everything - About time

I hope you enjoy this piece

I have a watch. A gift from my brother. He and I got identical watches to celebrate a company we had built. I lost mine and he gave me his. It runs fast, and the bezel is scratched. It has to be wound every day. I don’t even check the time on it, but I set it in the morning.

We bought the watches decades ago for our whole team, Tag Heuer analog models with leather straps and black faces. Each was a very simple token of a moment years ago when we were a team, and the case is engraved with the word “partnership”. Our company was wildly successful until it wasn’t, and it is still the best company I have worked at. I suspect the others feel the same way.

The watch is not a badge earned for a job well done. Perhaps it was once, but that was a celebration by a prior me and a prior we. I have had the band replaced twice and the bezel once. I would love to replace the mechanism as an act of irony, but it would be lost on most people.

I have an odd sense of humor.

I once thought I had lost the watch again, and was almost grieving. The grieving passed, and the watch came back. Was it even the most recent one I had lost? We may give too much value to provenance.

Perhaps I will pretend that I found the original watch and one day will find my brother’s and return it to him. Love feels silly sometimes, especially when it’s real.

I didn’t wear the watch for a long time. A watch is a habit, a little arbitrary, whether it has a stopwatch or counts your steps or just tells time. A mechanical watch flows through time indivisible, not a set of bits. It is self-contained and opaque. It runs down.

Knowledge is often how we protect ourselves from knowing. Certainty is a hell of a drug.

The watch has a sweep hand. All analog watches should have a sweep hand, even if it hides the fact of the escapement. A sweep hand never arrives; it just flows uninterrupted.

Of course, provided I wind it. Every day.

We were a fantastic team, wholly decent people excited to change the world. In retrospect, that phrase is so silly, everyone changes the world—that is the point. Choosing the road more travelled-by would also have made all the difference. It is the choice, not the route. And the five of us chose to be together for that brilliant few years. We changed the world, but not in the way we meant.

True connection, when you see each other, mocks every transactional relationship that follows. We use phrases like “I would not be where I am today without …” when we should understand that “I would not be who I am without …” We create our lives with others. We conform to their shape and become more beautiful and more real.

I have never used the stopwatch on my watch. Occasionally I will press it by accident, which results in the spring winding down prematurely. Funny how marking time can stop it. I don’t really care about timing things, about accelerating an endpoint. Imprecision is a private act of defiance.

Running is a beautiful act, winning is a punctuation mark.

I have won before, and it is delightful, but it is remarkable how quickly the moment passes, leaving you back with yourself. Life continues.

One of my favorite memories of my son was when he was a senior on his high school football team. I loved to watch him play, because he was young and beautiful and I love him so dearly. Early in the season, the time was running down, and his team was going to win. He made a catch then ran out of bounds at the one yard line. He never spoke of it or demanded credit, just offered pointless grace to his opponent. The scorekeeper tallied nothing.

It is weird to be most proud of the touchdown he didn’t make.

It is afternoon. My watch says 2:08, which probably means it is sometime after 2pm. I am taking off on a flight, and the flight attendant is warm and kind, and making a joke about getting old. We both understand the sadness of getting old that isn’t really sad, mostly just uncomfortable. She tells me her new glasses let her see a gnat at twenty meters. I tell her I will call her when I have a lost gnat. She laughs.

I have spent a lot of time in airplanes over my life. I still recall when I received my “Million Mile Flyer” award. I was on a regional carrier, and the attendant said, “Congratulations, and thank you for being a million mile flyer. We don’t have champagne on this flight, do you want a can of Pringles?” A perfectly observed ceremony befitting the utter banality of the achievement. I should tell this story to my gnat-spying friend.

I imagine giving my watch to one of our kids. At that moment it will become something totally different. It will become a token of me, or hopefully we, a completely different story at a different time. And it will probably still run fast.