Time never stops. It moves forward; it’s never in reverse, and the closest humanity has ever come to a time machine is, well, a timing machine.
So said horologist Michael Page of Heart Beat Clocks and Antiques, a Gen-Z who’s spent more than half of his 26 years on this planet contemplating both the philosophical and mechanical aspects of the universe’s quintessential measure.
Page said that everything moved in cycles, well before tick-tock helped us measure time and way before TikTok helped us waste it. “The sun rose and set, so did the moon, and shadows moved by the time of day. Humans later invented mechanics to help us track the movement of the universe, and that’s what a horologist does. Page designs, builds, fixes, and loves everything from grandfather clocks to quartz wrist watches.
It’s an old-school vocation for someone who’s living evidence that not all Gen Z’s are living clichés.
Time is both mechanical and philosophical
His obsession with time started at a young age. His grandmother had a musical cuckoo clock in her household. Christmas presents were opened when the cuckoo finished its tune on Christmas Eve; dinner was served when the cuckoo returned to its perch.
“She used to say if there’s no ticking in my house, there’s no heartbeat. Your house is dead,” he said. At 11, he built his first clock from parts handed to him in a plastic bag by a family friend. “It took about six months to rebuild it,” he said.
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Fast forward to now, and Page makes clocks and fixes broken timepieces at a rate of around 40-55 a month. He works alone, in solitude.
“Whether it’s an heirloom that needs some love or a pendulum that needs replacing, or someone who wants a custom design,” he said.
“When I work with timepieces, I forget about time,” he said. “But time is in my hands.”
Many of his clients bring in heirlooms. Watches handed down through generations or clocks that stood in family homes for decades. When they stop ticking, something emotional does, too.
“I do what I do to restore the joy, restore the faith and restore something that had a memory,” he said.
Page also does not see time as the villain many people turn it into.
“We blame it when we are late, when we age, when we run out of it,” the Gen-Z said, “But time is neutral. It simply moves,” he added.
“We are the ones who rush through it. Five minutes late and you are in trouble. A few minutes early and you feel organised. We schedule our lives down to the minute and then complain there is never enough of it.”
Laundry. School runs. Meetings. Gym. Dinner. Collapse. Repeat. And yet, he said, who is anyone to judge how someone else fills their day?
‘We blame time when it runs out’
Page also does not subscribe to the romantic idea that time heals everything. It just keeps going forward; that’s the deal.
“Anything that’s good comes to an end,” he said. That includes moments, phases and even people. But you can never go backwards and undo regret or relive moments of zest and joy, except, of course, by memory.
He said that he never chose horology; it’s as if it chose him. A fellow watchmaker once told him something he took as his own rule of thumb. “A watchmaker is never rich,” he said. “But he is never poor.” There’s metaphor in that.
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