Recall the Tomb Raider movie. Lara Croft wakes from sleep. She has had a disturbing dream. She wakes to hear a clock ticking. She searches her whole house and discovers a hidden compartment built under the staircase. Stored in this space are boxes and treasures and the ticking is louder. The ticking is an antique clock. This item has import yet it is a mystery. What makes it tick? She has intuition that INSIDE the clock is something far more significant. She and her side kicks set about disassembling the clock in a methodical way. She is impatient and finally resorts to a hammer. She pulverizes the clock; hidden within is the ALL SEEING EYE. It unlocks and stops time.
What is the core of a person? Do we have a central mechanism? What sets us into motion? What makes us tick? Sometimes, to get to our core, someone has to take a sledge hammer to us, busting up the entrapments built around us. It is painful, especially if we have grown fond of the encasement that houses our core. Like an alarm clock, we may sit dormant and on hold until some predesignated time. Most clocks need to be wound or reset. My mother had a lovely mantle clock whose previous owner had to have been blind. The face of the clock had three slots for the clock key to fit and wind the mechanism. Scratched across the clock face were markings from the key being dragged over the surface between the holes. The process of winding a clock can leave marks, damage. Pull the chains of a grandfather clock too far and you can lock up the mechanism; it will not measure time.
In an ideal world, all clocks and watches would be self-winding. In that ideal world, the internal mechanisms would never need attention. They would hum along undeterred and untouched. This is not an ideal world. We have to be wound up. We have to be reset. Our internal mechanisms can get locked and damaged and then it requires a trip to the watchmaker. And sometimes, we are trapped inside an antique clock but our core is a subatomic measuring device that tracks to the nanosecond. I love old clocks. I love the tinkling of chimes and the bongs that mark the hours. But I also love precision and exactitude.
What is the core of a person?