I have a thing for clocks. You can ask my wife. You can question my daughter. My sons will fill you in on the truth. I love a good clock.
The louder it ticks, the happier I am.
The greater the ring of the chime, the more joy I experience.
Over the years I’ve gathered a coo coo clock from the Black Forest of Germany, and added a beautiful banker’s clock in my office, and my best timepiece is a work shop ticker made from a circular saw blade.
The traditional clocks require attention and maintenance if they are to fulfill their purpose. They need regular winding. They need dusting. In short, they need a little love on a daily basis.
So, you can imagine my chagrin when I discovered the clocks were all stopped. No ticks. No tocks. No magical hourly chimes. The most troubling revelation came when I started counting back the days to when I’d last wound the spring and pulled the chain. More than a week had passed and the clocks paid the price of my negligence.
Most distressing of all, I realized that my desire to succeed at work, move my job to the next level and prove myself to my company and my co-workers, took every spare minute of my time. Early mornings. Late nights. Weekends. Work and more work. Every spare hour was used to get the job done and yet, there was always more to do and never enough time to get it done.
Ironically, my lack of time resulted in my inability to accurately keep my time keepers functioning fully. And if the clocks on the wall suffered because of my out-of-control work schedule, packed to the rim and painfully full, what else declined in my business and distraction? Did I fail to love my family well, just as I failed to tighten the springs on the Banker’s Clock? Did I fail to listen intently, just as I failed to pull the chain and weight on the coo coo?
My need to make the most of every minute to move my career forward resulted in the loss of the most precious commodity of all: Time dedicated to those things that matter even more.
Today I wound the clocks for the first time in weeks. While I can’t turn back time, or regain that which is lost, I can certainly count every minute moving forward, making the most of every precious and fleeting second that remains.
