Quick poll — hands up, who here feels ready for 2020?
I’m not sure I am. There was so much I wanted to get done in 2019, and I definitely didn’t get to do all of it. Learn French, that’s something I wanted to do in 2019. (Also in 2018, 2017, 2016 and all the rest of it. Still hasn’t happened.) I’m not alone in this, am I? Not the learning French part, I mean, the not feeling ready part. Does anyone else wake up feeling dislocated, mislocated, unlocated in time? What day is it? How did 2019 pass this quickly? All that time — those 525,600 minutes, as immortalised in that Broadway musical — where did it go?
One of the craziest things you’ll come to realise, doing what we do, is that we can learn everything there is to know about timepieces, and still know absolutely nothing about time.
That’s okay, though. It’s easy to get a little carried away when you’re surrounded every day by luxurious watches, massive multi-megabyte photography of micro-mechanical beauty, the profundity of skill and craft that an industry can hold; the creativity and potent ambition that traces an unbroken lineage back to that first guy who looked at the sun and moon and stars moving across the sky and said to himself, “I’m going to make a machine that decodes the natural order that God set in place.” Having a humbling sort of epiphany every now and then isn’t a bad thing.
We’ve come a long way, and yet at the same time maybe we haven’t. We’re still trying to figure out what our place in the universe is, we’re still straining ourselves to make a difference in life, we still have no idea — not really, anyway — about God or nature (I’m looking at you, climate-change deniers) or the universe or any of that big-picture stuff.
Someone once said that the way to make the big-picture stuff work out is to do the small things right. That’s how watchmaking became a centuries-old métier, by breaking time down into units, taking care of things one wheel at a time, one balance half-swing at a time.
We’ve got an awful lot in store for 2020, including some really exciting new developments for WorldTempus and what we’ll be doing in order to bring you the best watch stories and news. We’ll tell you more next year. That’s in two days, in case you hadn’t realised.
Hey, 2020, we see you there, just around the corner. Are you ready for us?
