Pick up an old watch and the first thing you notice is its weight. After a minute in your hand, the metal is hot. The glass has a few fine scratches that you can only see when you tilt it to the light. The leather strap softened and darkened where his wrist had been, molding into a shape that didn’t fit yours. Some still tick if you hold them close to your ear, a persistent little sound that lingers long after the person who injured it is gone.
Now imagine that the clock could report itself. Imagine if he could list everything he saw from the morning he bought it until the afternoon. We assume that the list will be full of stages. Weddings, birthdays, big trips, framed events. But those moments would hardly be recorded. They would be a handful of bright spots in an ocean of something quieter.
Almost everything that hour saw was ordinary. He saw her standing up drinking her coffee. He found himself tying his shoes, checking the clock at the bus stop, waiting outside the school, falling asleep in the chair with the TV on. It has seen thousands of commutes, ten thousand small decisions, and more cups of tea than anyone can count. If the clock told you the truth, it would tell you that life is most remarkable in the middle. And it would be true.
This bothers us because we are trained to chase the highlight reel. We photograph the extraordinary and let the mundane slip past unrecorded, as if it didn’t count. It turns out that we were a little bit wrong about that. Harvard Business School researcher Ting Zhang studies how we evaluate our own experiences. found “What is ordinary now will become more extraordinary in the future.” We grossly underestimate how much the little things will mean to us later. We forgot to remember the conversation. Playlist. An ordinary Sunday. These are the things we would give anything to reconsider.
There is something that gets deeper as you get older. Amit Bhattacharjee and Cassie Mogilner in a set of eight studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed “as people get older, they define themselves more by the ordinary experiences that make up their everyday lives.” When you’re young, what’s unusual tells you who you are. First job, move abroad, adventure. Over the years, this also flies. You become your mornings. You become the way you prepare breakfast, the route you take and the people you sit with at the end of the day.
I think about this more than I expected, now that I have a little girl and a second girl on the way. My own grandparents are far away, a long flight and several time zones away, and I have no mementos of them sitting in my drawer. What I have instead is a dawning sense that the life I’m building right now is a very repetitive feeling from within, the real thing. Not holidays. I don’t worry about remembering ordinary weekday mornings and all the simple afternoons.
Most mornings in our house look pretty much the same. We wake up, eat breakfast at the kitchen island, my husband goes to work and my daughter and I walk part of the way with him before heading to the supermarket for what we’re cooking that night. None of these are photogenic. None of this would attract attention. Still, I began to suspect that this was the clockwork of my life, the most important part. The belt is already fitting these days.
Maybe that’s why old things move us so much. A clock, unlike a photo album, has never been self-curated. He did not choose the flattering moments, and quietly threw away the rest. He just made time for it all, the proud days and the boring days and the days he wanted to forget. There is an honesty to it. He kept it his whole life, not the edited version, and it made him feel more like a real person than any picture could ever portray.
We tend to think of the ordinary as a synonym for wasted, as if a day without an event is a day without actually happening. But the clock knows better. The watch considered each of those simple watches the same as the brilliant watches because there was no difference to the watch. There was just time, to pass, to spend on something. Life is not a few days that you put in a frame. Life is a huge, delicate, unforgettable remnant, the part that no one draws.
So if you have your grandfather’s watch, grandmother’s ring, or any other small item that has outlived the wearer, I’d advise you to stop waiting for it to tell you about the big moments. It really doesn’t remember any better than the rest. What he remembers is the ordinary devotion of a man who gets up day by day and lives a life of little things done with greater care. That’s not the boring part of the story. Here’s the story.
While you still have your normal days, try to hold back some of the days that feel too simple to notice. Not all of them. Just remind your future self that this is the time. One day these will be the years that your own clock has quietly kept, and you will be amazed at how much life is hidden in them.
