A college professor in a diocesan bulletin writes about a eureka moment. His digital watch stopped and was in a watch repair shop thinking it was the battery that was a problem and wanted it replaced. The store was filled with customers so while waiting, paged thru a magazine on the counter with examples of watches.
One of the watches that caught his attention had no second or minute hand. A strange type of watch with only an hour hand. At first, he thought it was a stop watch, but no it was clearly a wrist watch.
Now he was open to creativity in the making of watches but what good was a watch with only an hour hand? It didn't make much sense to him. How does one measure time with only the hour hand?
Beside the picture of the watch, he saw an explanation of the watch and began to nod his head in approval of what he read. The reason for the watch was to get a general idea of time: seeing the position of the hour hand you would guess about the minutes.The watch was a movement against becoming a slave to time instead of its master.
Those who live needing to know the exact minute and second of their day should possess this watch. Those obsessed with exactitude need this kind of watch. They will be blessed with an abundance of leisure time. The watch does not measure time but imagines time. The habit we have grown to accept is to measure how much time we have before the end of some work, at what hour and minute we have to meet someone, often shackles us.
With this watch, we use the imagination to have a rough idea of when a certain person will come. We can meet at sunset or when the western sky is in color. This is not wasting time but a way of finding time that we have lost because of the way we have planned our days.
We have become the slaves of time, fear to lose it, and spend time wasting it. We have just so much time on this earth and spend too much of it with technological gimmicks and forget what is important.
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