I started collecting clocks in college. It’s the first thing I look for when in a new antique store and I even have a tattoo of one. There is a clock in every room of my house, including bathrooms and patios. When I was updating my patio last spring as my quarantine project and sending photos to my family, my sister replied and said, “You would put a clock on the patio.”
Maybe it’s because every Sunday growing up I watched my dad wind up the clock that always lived in our dining room. Or, every time I spent the night at my Nana and Gramps’ house, I would wait until everyone was almost asleep, knock on my grandparents’ bedroom door and ask, “Did you turn the chime off?” They have a grandfather clock I’m obsessed with from my Gramps’ station in Belgium and it would make its presence known every hour on the hour. So as the grandkid who slept in the living room, I didn’t want to be woken up that often. I loved the ability to manipulate the clock’s power.
Some people feel rushed and unsettled by the constant ticking, but it centers me. The tick tells me, The world is still spinning as it should and you are where you should be. It’s not a noise of rush to me, but a noise of consistency.
But the tick isn’t the only thing about clocks I love. Their reminder to take it all in is what’s best. Clocks are the only face you can look at and see past, present, and future. Clocks remind us that we can’t just take in the now, but the now is married with what’s happened and will happen.
Clocks tell us:
Look at it all.
Don’t get stuck here.
Keep ticking forward.
That’s what I’ve been doing lately as I write and share my coming out story, which truthfully is simply put – the last ten years of my life. All those years are threaded with the narrative of my coming out and the two cannot be separated.
And if I were to look at the parts and not the whole, if I went away from what the dozen clocks I own are telling me to do, the journey would be too bleak.
Instead, when I look at the turbulent past, the oh my gosh, so good present, and the hopeful future – that’s where the beauty is.
I truly feel that now is the time to be sharing these words because I can see a timeline and hope and joy down the road I never saw before. I’m so excited to have my whole story in one place for you soon – details to come, promise!
So I will share the hard stuff, uncensored and honest, but they’re coming from a place of healing and hope.
Because remember what the clocks say:
Look at it all. Don’t get stuck here. Keep ticking forward.
So I invite you to apply the clock’s message to the season you’re in now. Are you stuck in the now, or are you crediting the courage in your past and the hope to come?
Look at it all.
Olivia Meeks 