Urs Winkler

I’ve been retired for a month. It still feels strange to say it out loud. After forty years working for one of Geneva’s most iconic luxury watchmakers, my calendar is now blank. No flights to catch. No boardrooms in Singapore or hotel breakfasts in Tokyo. The quiet feels like a stranger who’s let himself in and is sitting comfortably in my living room.

I still live here in Geneva, Switzerland. Same apartment, same view of the lake. The Jet d’Eau rises and falls like a breath. But the rhythm of my days has changed. I sleep a little longer. I read more slowly. I walk through Parc des Bastions just to feel the gravel crunch under my shoes.

Yesterday, while flipping through an old travel journal, I remembered something that happened years ago, on an express train from Shanghai to Beijing. I was in China for an exhibition, presenting a new line of timepieces. I sat opposite a man—middle-aged, polite, and impeccably dressed. He wore one of our watches. Or so I thought.

We started chatting in English. He asked what I did, and I told him. His eyes lit up. With a proud smile, he rolled up his sleeve and removed the watch, handing it to me. He said it had belonged to his father, a gift for graduating university decades ago. "He wore it every day until he passed," the man said. "Now I wear it. It reminds me of his voice, his advice, the way he laughed."

I turned the watch over in my hand and, within seconds, knew it wasn’t real. A very good fake—impressive even. I paused, unsure whether to tell him. But something in the way he spoke—so tender, almost reverent—stopped me. The value of that watch had nothing to do with precision mechanics or rare materials. It lived in memory, in meaning.

So I handed it back, nodded, and said, “It’s a beautiful piece. You’re lucky to have it.”

Now, at sixty-five, I find myself returning to moments like that. I used to measure worth in craftsmanship, in details only insiders notice. But now I wonder if the real treasures are in the stories, not the things. What endures isn’t what we build—but what we leave in others.

I’ll miss the work. But I have time now—to read, to think, to let the silence speak.