WITH INTENTION
There is a watch that does not measure time as the space between seconds, but as a constant movement. A quartz watch can be easily recognized by a seconds hand that jumps 60 times per minute. In mechanical watches, the seconds hand sweeps around the dial, ticking in quicker and shorter robotic movements. And then there’s the Spring Drive, engineered in 2005 at Seiko, which makes the hand glide smoothly at a constant speed. There is no moment ending for another to start. Time just flows.
This is deeply rooted in Japanese culture because they associate this quiet motion with the way things move freely in nature, and not between segments of time. The way seasons blend into each other. This watch gives you the feeling that it runs in tandem with time, and is not just a machine for counting the seconds away.
Not having a timeline divided into segments as we are used to makes you think the hours are something we made up. So, if temporal landmarks don't exist except in our heads, where does our notion of time come from? And why do we feel so strongly about a sense of time as motion?
Because motion carries information. For a tribe in Papua New Guinea, time is deeply linked with the nearby river. Wherever they are, the people tend to gesture downhill, towards the mouth of the river when talking about the past, and uphill, towards the river's source, when referencing the future. The Yupno tribe thinks that the past is water that has already flowed by, while the future is its spring. Time can be felt as running straight, as it does for us westerners, but only where the river runs straight. Where it kinks, so too does time. That only seems natural, since it would be an illusion to think about time as a straight line.
This is true regardless of the direction they are facing. If looking downhill when talking about the future, a person would gesture backwards up the slope. But for the Aymara, indigenous people in the Andes, time flows from a point in front of them, through the present, and back to the past. And although it is not linked to any topography, they have a unique way of looking at the timeline. The Aymara also feel time as motion, but the speaker faces the past and has their backs to the future. To be fair, that makes perfect sense, since you can see what happened in the past, it’s right in front of you, and you can’t see the future yet, so it’s right behind you. The Aymara word for tomorrow has a literal meaning of some day behind one's back.
The publishing house was slowly put together as a side project for a while now. This June marks four years since work started on the first photobook back in 2020. It was officially launched in June 2022, so officially, this should be the house’s two-year anniversary. I think it's important to reflect on time in general, to look back at how thoughts and ideas moved from an imagined future to a near future, then became plans backed up by a system, or more like a gut feeling. All you had to do at that point is to actually do the thing, bring it into current affairs through action and intention. It's also important to be comfortable in a transitional state and flow like the Seiko.
It's good that more people carry around a project list, a dream scheme, a master plan, or a good system waiting for the perfect deployment. There are a lot of people with ideas, but there are very few who make them happen. Moving with intention and facing the future goes a long way.
