While staying in Cologne our hotel was in view of the cathedral. I watched people walk from the window. And I heard the bells.

The bells rang on the hour. Not every hour. I couldn’t find the pattern during our stay. I was teleported to a time when the bells would tell the city to pray. Bells were and still are a way to notify the people all around.

BONG

Pay attention!!

BONG

Stop and notice!!

BONG

This is an ancient human need, both individual and community.

I need to join the gathering. Or I need to take an action—like closing the gate.

The whole community may need to pause and mourn when someone dies.

I hear these church bells that have been all those things for the people around for centuries.

We all know that the sun rises and sets every day. We can pay attention to the moon waxing and waning, and even the stars moving in the sky. The bells were created by human beings to add new points of significance in the day.

The age of industry created non-agrarian methods of production. Factories required people to gather at times not tied to the sun, and bells were the way to call out the start of the work day. The workers came—DON’T BE LATE!—and the machines could make the things that people needed and wanted.

The business in the area would have had competing bells that would sound out. This was the way to communicate far away. The factory needed people to show up for the work at the factory, And the people wanted to get paid.

It was hard to get used to the factory’s demands. The work force was agrarian peasants who got up with the sun. The machines of the factory were not affected by light or dark, and they would work winter or summer. The industrial age brought so much productivity. The bells would wake us up in the dark of night.

And in its season, more rest. Long days in summer, and shorter in the winter. That must have been part of the “innovation” of daylight savings time.

Now, I strap a watch to my body that taps my wrist for notifications, and a device in my pocket the chimes to remind me to do a task.

I have a feeling in my gut that this movement is out of control. Was I meant to be notified and brought to attention in all these ways? If everything is important, then nothing is important.

But those bells are so beautiful. I want to hear them. Their significance as a call to action is lost and only the beauty remans.