About time

By Conrad Beaubien

There is something about hand-wound watches that continue to hold great personal appeal. In my world the self-wind, battery or phone methodology just doesn’t cut it.

Hand-wound watches are something I have stuck with since before time was invented. Well not quite that long but at least for a few decades. I have a small collection of old watches that despite the exercise of downsizing my household horde, the watches remain on the ‘stay’ list in the parlance of the downsizer profession.

I admit that it’s a conundrum when someone who owns five watches can hardly ever be on time. In my defence, I do make effort, but I’m told it’s about time management, a subject that’s generally over my head. I can’t lay blame on the watches; they keep perfect time. One factor for lateness that owns partial responsibility is the clock on the dashboard of my car. It’s accurate for only half the year as I have yet to figure how to change it come daylight savings time, which come to think, daylight management weighs on folks like me who try to remember whether to fall back or spring forward in addition to keeping track of passwords to just about everything, hence all the more reasons to do away with the daylight convention.

In fact there was a time when I stopped wearing a watch, which was precipitated mainly by getting stuck in traffic. Through self-diagnosis I realized that checking my watch at every minute caused a combination of tennis elbow and anxiety. I adopted the philosophy that if I’m running late, I’m simply late and took the giant step of leaving my watch at home. It helped cure the anxiety business as I discovered the one-size-fits-all story of being stuck in traffic works in many scenarios.

There was one repercussion to leaving my watch behind, however. This is what I attribute to how I’ve managed to collect five vintage watches. One watch would replace a previous one mainly because I could not recall where I stashed that previous one. Just so you know, that’s the story I tell myself and anyone who asks in order to justify my weakness when it comes to old watches.

I have stayed firm over time in the belief that time is a prompter of angst. As an antidote I adopt Zen mind as when I recently came across my watch collection, which had been neglected in the hurry of the world. As I began to wind all five of them, one by one, music soothed my ears, a banquet of ticking sounds rose to the heavens, the experience rising to new heights when I also gently pulled out the crown, one watch at a time and reset the hour.

I’m told that timepieces fit into a category of what is referred to as mature technology. Think telephone, bicycle or farming, processes that have matured in their development as opposed to things that are incubating or at a pioneering level. The very thought of being in possession of items of mature technology boosts my frame of mind, although few will vouch for me knowing anything about technology and fewer still would think that maturity applies in my case.

The mechanisms of spring-wound clocks and watches are ingenious in design and functionality. One mainspring tucked away in there, when wound up, gives momentum to a set of gears that mobilizes a weighted balance wheel almost as if in perpetual motion.

Imagine the contradiction when someone insists they don’t have time to wind a watch? Whoa, I say. That hits on a key feature that with wind-up, you engage with the timepiece daily; one can take that moment to do breathing exercises, chant a favourite mantra as you savour the power of thumb and forefinger engaging with the stem, turning it as you fathom in deepest consciousness putting wheels in motion for another day. It’s that feeling just like when you drop the needle on a spinning vinyl album, or shifting gears on a manual transmission.

Think of it as reconnecting with your inner mainspring, your balance wheel and calibration; the aesthetic and fine craftsmanship of old watches; that certain je ne sais quoi of timelessness and invention, non? Escape the pre-packaged world, come away. At least until the alarm on your phone goes off.

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