Watches

I’ve been thinking a lot about watches over the past few months – like a lot about watches. If I look at my Chrome browser tabs, most of them are watch related. The immediate reason for this is that I have a few friends who got into fancy mechanical watches a few years ago, and their influence has slowly rubbed off on me. But in reality, the interest predates my friends’ recent influence by decades.

When I was young, I was given my first watch – one of those digital multifunctional Timex IronMan watches – by my grandfather. I loved it and wore it every day. Years later, when my grandfather passed away, I ended up sorting through much of his watch collection. He had dozens of watches, and most of them didn’t fit my style at the time, so I (regrettably) only kept a few. The time I spent helping my family organize his estate was a blur, happening during a particularly turbulent time towards the end of high school.

My grandfather had several interests that I’ve subconsciously picked up from him over the years: photography, pens, and now watches.

In the end, I kept three of his watches. One was a mechanical Seiko with his name engraved on it. I got it ticking a few months ago, but it clearly needs servicing; it only runs for a few minutes before stopping. The other two were quartz watches, and they both work perfectly. None of them are fancy in the watch enthusiast sense, but they still hold an immense amount of sentimental value.

I’ve been wearing his old Timex Expedition for a few years now, and it’s become something of a good luck charm. I’ve worn it on job interviews, my first flight, among many other “milestone” days. It fits my rather small wrist well, and was the first leather strapped watch that I enjoyed wearing.

The other watch that I regularly wear is a Timex Weekender that I got a few years ago, after being fed up with the noise and tethered feeling that came along with wearing an Apple Watch.

It’s a noisy quartz watch. You can hear it ticking from across a quiet room. It’s gotten scratched a few times, as I wear it frequently and it has a cheap mineral glass crystal. I like the fact that it’s an imperfect object. It tells the time with sufficient accuracy, but that’s about it. No notifications, no vibrating buzzes, nothing to recharge, not even a date window. It’s purely utilitarian, in a way that makes me treat time as something to be casually observed rather than optimized around or fixated upon.

One of the first meditation instructions I received, when I was starting to practice somewhat seriously, was to listen to the silence between the ticks of a clock. Not to the ticks themselves, but the space in between them. That instruction and this watch have fused in a way that makes me remember it whenever I wear it.¹

This Christmas, I gave several watches to people I care about, which brought me a lot of joy – quite plausibly more for me than them. I got my brother his own Timex Weekender, with a velcro strap that I hope will complement the Timex IronMan that he wears quite often. And I got my Dad a mechanical Seiko as a potential complement for the Apple Watch he wears regularly.

As for myself, I “accidentally” bought a Casio F-91W as another no-frills digital quartz watch to wear. I have my eyes set on getting a mechanical Seiko for myself, but I’m trying to track down an out-of-production green dial model which has taken some time.

In any case, I’m also planning to finally get my grandfather’s Seiko serviced. It’s sat in a drawer for years, and I’d like to wear it again.