Clockworks

If you think everything is controlled by a gigantic clockwork mechanism filled with gears and springs, you’re closer to right than you thought. The gears are, in some cases, quite intricate; some are so small you cannot easily see them without a microscopic viewer. The teeth of one gear move the teeth in another. Mechanicals then seem to move of their own accord, as though granted life, when in fact they’ve only been given automation.

Much like us.

The clockwork pieces include music boxes and phonographs and timekeepers and mechanical toys and a vending machine that exchanges ancient coins for brief spritzes of water. You have to bring your own cup.

All these wheels and mainsprings and escapements require only one thing to continue moving, and that’s where the problem lies. When’s the last time you broke out the key, that thin, bronze key, stuffed in the back of your kitchen junk drawer or hidden at the bottom of a box of childhood mementos  stuffed in the corner of your closet? When’s the last time you stuck in that key and gave this clockwork world of ours a good winding up?

When’s the last time you properly wound yourself up?

No, the key to rejuvenating yourself may not be the same tiny patina-greened key, but it’s just as simple. Continue to grow and learn, keep those internal gears turning, apply the necessary torque by pushing past your comfort zone, discover a world or at least a thought you haven’t considered before. Do a crossword, go for a long walk through the local public gardens, pick up a cheap camera and start taking pictures of the everyday things you see on the way to the bus stop or train platform. Do something you haven’t done before, look in a way you haven’t seen, and you’ll find you’re creating the friction necessary to get your mechanicals in tune.

Because it’s not just a clockwork body in which we reside. It’s a piece of art, a spritz of water, a sequence of minutes woven together in a dance, and the song of a magically mechanized nightingale.

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