Musings on the metaphysical nature of time, and hopefully getting my Rolex fixed.

I wrote in an earlier post about how I’d managed to break my wristwatch – rather an old Rolex, it turns out, one I bought in 1981 as a 21st birthday present to myself. I remember paying £270 for it, which was rather a lot of money in those days – but as a young and single man, a final year engineering apprentice, I’d nothing else to spend my money on except cars and girls – so what the hell? The trouble with your Rolex though is that only an authorised Rolex dealer will touch it when it goes wrong, and they seem to have a standard charge for putting things right whether you’ve simply scratched the glass and want it polishing out or you’ve had it run over by a Sherman tank.

So, anyway, I took it into town and the rather glamorous lady assistant in the jewlers asked me how old the watch was, and I said 1981, and she said: “Gosh I’d only just been born then,”  and I thought – am I really that old ? She was tall and blonde and and lovely and though she didn’t mean me to, I suddenly felt ancient, bald and crumpled. I mean, I’m married and everything and wouldn’t even think about it, but let’s just say under other circumstances I would definitely have fancied the pants off her  – but clearly I would just have been an old fool making an ass of himself, on account of being old enough to be her father. But that’s life, and just one of the interesting conundrums it throws at us older chaps – like what use is it feeling like a teenager, when the skin you’re wearing looks like it could do with a good ironing, and glamourous women no longer even look twice at you? (not that they ever did in the first place, but you know what I mean)

But I digress. Back to the Rolex: It has to go away for an estimate but it looks like it could cost me somewhere in the order of what I originally paid for it to get it going again, and I’m wondering: is it worth it? I could buy a lot of watch for £270 these days – admittedly not a Rolex, but does the Rolex mean that much to me now?

The young  guy who bought it in 1981 – my younger self – doesn’t exist any more, does he? So what does it matter what he would think about this older and supposedly wiser self saying stuff it and burying the thing in a bottom drawer somewhere? I mean – it’s not like I wear it every day is it? And I seem as fond of my current Timex as I am of the old Rolex. But we’re clearly talking about more than a wristwatch here, aren’t we? We’re talking about something that’s symbolic of a defining era in my past. We’re talking about the things I thought, the hopes I had, the hopeless loves I had by then already lost, to say nothing of the desires and the aspirations of that young man just setting out, finding his feet in the world. I think back and I really like that young guy, he was okay,  he meant well. I hope he’d feel the same way about me if he could look forward upon me from my past, as I can look back upon him from his future. And I think he would be hoping I wouldn’t give up on it – whatever “it” is, this symbol, this mysterious thing I feel when think back upon those times – this thing we share.

So I’ll bite the bullet and I’ll get it fixed.

In Buddhism this would not make sense of course. It would be like trying to hold on to something from the past – a classic case of attachment. We evolve. We are are never the same person from one moment to the next. Our consciousness changes, it’s an illusion of sorts, a compendium of memory, emotion and instinct. We should let it go, lose our sense of the flow of life and time, and seek to live only in the present moment – because that is the only useful reality – everything else is either memory or anticipation and we can change the contents of neither. That’s all well and good, but I think as long as we can maintain a moderate perspective on the past, it can serve us well to delve into it occasionally – not out of a desire for nostalgic self indulgence, but to understand better who we are now by reminding us of who we once were.

It’s no coincidence that this question of getting a time-piece fixed causes me to think more deeply on questions regarding the nature of time itself. Many of my stories in recent years have played hard and fast with the conventional notionsof time, blurring the present into the past and the future into the present, all of them somehow adding up to inform each other in meaningful ways. The Rolex has measured the linear time of my life for the past twenty eight years, but I’m no longer sure the deeper part of who I think I am exists in linear time at all. Getting on for a decade ago now, I stood before  a mountain and felt myself slip into an eerie state of mind where the notion of time seemed rather a fuzzy concept, and where this bag of bones standing up in his boots was as much a part of his experience of life as  the mountain he was looking at – that reality and time were not physical at all, that physicality itself was somehow negotiable, that the only reality was essentially psychological, the only reality was mind .

I still do not understand that experience, but it suggests to me now that youngster’s as alive and well and as fully a part of my experience of life as he ever was, as I am a part of his. From his frame of reference he can have no concept of me, his older self looking back upon him and promising, hand on heart to get his watch fixed, just as I can have no concept of my future self looking back upon these words and wondering what the hell I thought I was blathering on about. But there is a connection.

I’m sure of it.