Consider Your Watch
Why do I miss my old watch?
It lasted three years before the battery finally died, lovingly but scarcely held together with sewing thread and electrical tape. Despite my efforts and unreasonable attachment to the cheap patchwork instrument, I discovered it was disposable by design: the battery was impossible to replace, and my efforts with the screwdriver only scratched and marred the plastic that had molded to my wrist. I had rarely taken it off: I ran races and track meets, took tests, played violin, I even slept with it strapped against my pulse — a second heartbeat — for three years.
Its replacement has a much sleeker design, with a large, pristine digital face that never smudges and adjusts for daylight savings time automatically. It displays the 12-hour time and date in gentle sans-serif pixelated font, and even in the pitch black, the screen glows with jarring bright light at the push of a button. But instead of the gentle maintenance my old one required — buffing the face clean in circles with the corner of a shirtsleeve — this relationship requires periodic separation. It needs recharging every other week, reminiscent of old mechanical watches that required periodic re-winding — but decidedly less romantic. A tiny battery icon on its face is a constant looming reminder that I must take it off soon to recharge; my odd dependency on this accessory holds me hostage to its electric needs. Something tells me the presence of a dead watch on my wrist or the absence of one altogether would feel as unnerving as trying to move an arm that has fallen asleep. That accessibility of information becomes such a natural extension of my mind and body that I feel pangs of frustration at its loss rather than wonder at its presence. Being unplugged from the calendar feels like having a phantom limb: I impulsively reach for the time or the date, flick my wrist like I would scratch an itch, and find nothing where there has always been a comforting weight.
Running daily in high school necessitated a watch. Through constant training, I began to internalize a sense of synthetic time, to develop an internal metronome that corresponded with the commanding neon red digits beside the pavement. I could pace a lap to the second through intuitive pacing and strategic clock check-ins. But why did I wear my watch off the track, bring it into a brick-walled school with wall clocks in every classroom, keep it on the same hand in which I hold my smartphone and navigate my laptop? There’s no way I could even pretend to consider my patchwork watch a fashionable accessory. Besides specialized use such as in athletics, what really justifies a watch?
For the first time in years, I decided to go without one. Just last month, I left my watch at home during FOOT. Without the reference of time, trudging up mountains blurred into hazy stretches of pain and laughter, marked only by hunger levels and shifting shadows. When we set up camp at nightfall, it was the reddening of the sunset that urged us to hurry. Although some days I had idly wondered how long we had been walking, or how early we had risen, I did so with conscious curiosity, not unconscious impulse. Time was receding as a societal construct and becoming something more wild, irregular, and innate. The pace of my ticking heart, my rising thirst, our velocity over the terrain, everything varied with the rise and fall of the mountainous landscape. Hours would crawl by yet all blur together over grueling stretches of trail, whereas afternoon picnics were suspended in light, almost time-less. It was time to repack our bags when our stomachs felt full, when the stories settled into quiet hums of contemplation, and when the caterpillars discovered the pineapple scraps on the rocks.
I didn’t start to instinctually check my wrist again until the bus ride back to campus, as if returning to civilization reawakened some anxiety not only to physically re-assimilate, but to align myself with a societal timetable. Complex societies demand coordination; timekeeping was practically invented for that purpose. Perhaps that explains our curious cultural attachment to clocks: to the extent society is structured around time, we glorify the timekeepers. My parents still wind up the grandfather clock every week to hear it chime the hour, though our whole family wears watches ourselves. The tiny, all-but-useless front pockets on many jeans were originally designed for cowboys’ pocket watches, introduced by Levi’s in the 1800s. We silently ask strangers for the hour by tapping our bare wrists, as if to say, “Unfortunately, I am missing a watch; please, would you help me?”
Back to the bus. After four days being disconnected, why did I feel it necessary at that moment to know the exact time? Sure, I knew it was morning, but if I could know it were specifically 7 a.m., my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table at home, nursing warm coffee and a newspaper. At 9 a.m., my little brother would be arriving at the library right as it opened, and at noon, the highway near my house would be congested with lunchtime traffic. Time is like a crystal ball of scheduled predictions in that way. None of these facts would affect my bus ride, half a state away, but it felt comforting to know, the same way one might crave to know how much time remains in a dull lecture, even if that amount is encouraging or discouraging. Having a handle on time gives us a sense of control over our lives, a way to manage expectations and align our experiences with the world in motion.
For track, my watch was an instrument of confidence and control. Time was an objective marker of rank in the sport, by which you could compare high school athletes and Olympic medal-winners, as universal and fair as the human feet we run on. With a wristwatch, access to that objective measuring power was practically instantaneous, and I could always know where I stood. Cross country, on the other hand, was more flexible: because each race differed wildly in weather and physical course conditions, one’s time would fluctuate with such variables as humidity, temperature, whether the course had hills or gravel. Races were run more by feel, success defined not only by finishing place but by subjective feeling of exertion and mental effort. Despite relying on my watch for most other aspects of my life, from track season to daily calendar schedules, I found bliss in the freedom from time for cross country. The backpacking trip was similar, in that I could operate intuitively, pushing myself when comfortable and returning to time as a fluid measurement of the sun across the sky and the pounding metronome in my chest.
How else, then, can one escape time? Would I want to? The watch feels so intimate because it’s strapped to my body; checking the time becomes physical gesture, a neural pathway the same way running is more of a general will than a conscious effort to move one leg after the other. Theoretically, I could do without a watch, since the time of day is accessible from any number of other sources. One 2017 study found, for example, that we check our phones about every twelve minutes, teenagers even more frequently. But it’s more difficult to absorb the time when the colors and social notifications distract us; often I go to check the time, get derailed, then set down my phone 10 minutes later never having noticed or remembered the time, so I have to pick it up again. I think there’s a reason smartwatches have been slow to take off, to their manufacturers’ surprise: to some extent, I fear having access to the internet attached to my wrist, the way Google Glass (an abandoned product concept where they embedded a computer screen in the corner of your glasses) always made me shiver. But to have the persistent, gently ticking time of day on hand is no more unnatural than a second heartbeat, a sixth sense. It’s a sliver of access into the human hive mind, a sense of communal belonging.
I think I preferred my old watch for its imperfectections, its intimacy and reliability. Daylight savings jarred us both; manually resetting the dial was necessary for myself to adjust, too. My old watch was a comforting hand on the small of my back, a relay baton held just out of reach, a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, a future personal heirloom. Whenever I came back to it out of the woods I trusted it would still hold a charge (until it couldn’t).
