The watch I wear every day
On finally buying a single mechanical watch — and the small daily ritual of winding that has changed how I think about time.
I bought a single mechanical watch three years ago. It is a small steel watch with a cream dial, blued steel hands, a brown leather strap, and no date complication. It is from a small Swiss maker that produces a few hundred watches a year. The watch cost more than any single object I have ever bought.
It has been on my wrist almost every day for three years. It is the only watch I own. I sold or gave away the four or five other watches I had accumulated over the years. The single watch was, somewhat to my surprise, what I had been missing.
Why a mechanical watch
Because a mechanical watch is a small object with a will of its own. It has to be wound. It will, if neglected, stop. It is sensitive to magnetism, to shock, to extreme temperatures. The watch is, in a small way, a small living thing on the wrist, and the relationship to it is qualitatively different from the relationship to a digital or quartz timepiece.
The mechanical watch also looks different. The seconds hand moves in a continuous sweep rather than in discrete ticks. The whole face has a kind of living quality that battery-powered watches do not. The eye notices this within a week of wearing one.
The daily ritual of winding
I wind the watch every morning, before I put it on. The winding takes about thirty seconds. Twenty-eight turns of the crown, slowly. The watch comes to life under the fingertips. The small mainspring tensions. The escapement begins its work. By the time the watch is on the wrist it has been started for the day by the small action of my hand.
This is the part I had not expected. The daily winding is a small physical ritual that bookends the day in a way that nothing else does. The watch is started in the morning, by me, and it runs through the day, on the wrist, and at night it slows and eventually stops, and the next morning it starts again. The cycle is small and physical and it has, over three years, become one of the small constant rhythms that hold my life together.
What the watch does for time
It makes time something I have a relationship with. The phone gives me time on demand, with extreme precision, in a way that has nothing to do with my body or with the day. The watch gives me time in a way that requires looking, that involves a small physical motion of the wrist, that connects time to a specific small mechanical object on my body.
I check the time less than I used to and I think about time more. The watch on the wrist is a small constant reminder that time is passing and that the morning's winding is being slowly spent. There is a kind of small mortality awareness in this, which sounds heavier than it is. In practice it just makes the days, on average, slightly more felt.
On the cost
The watch was expensive. It is also, in any realistic projection, going to be on my wrist for the next four decades. The cost-per-year, if I keep it that long, is small. The cost-per-day is invisible. The watch will, with reasonable servicing every five or six years, outlast me. The whole purchase, in time, becomes a transfer to whoever inherits it.
If you have been wearing a quartz watch for years and have been thinking about a mechanical one, the difference is real. The daily winding is the part that I would not have predicted and that has, in the end, mattered the most.