The air of Barcelona seems always to be ringing…from the soaring spires of Barcelona Cathedral to the charming bell towers of ancient churches tucked into the quaint plaças and labyrinth corridors of the gothic quarter. The pealing of bells and the cooing of pigeons are two sounds that are time-stamped onto my memory - I suppose I’ll always associate them with Barcelona.

The cascade of church bells ringing above Carrer del Bisbe

The church bells are both charming and humorous to me because they ring at seemingly the most random times throughout the day! The majestic cathedral will toll 3 times – but it’ll be something like 9:13 am. Church bells join this sporadic concert at peculiar intervals throughout it the day - 12:04, 5:19, 10:17…with no readily apparent connection between the number of rings and the actual hour. Every time I hear a church bell here, I smile. Only once have we heard a church bell ring “correctly” – 12 times at noon (ish) one day when we were out exploring – and we laughed at the unexpected accuracy!

Enjoying a peaceful morning outside Barcelona Cathedral

I don’t know the full context behind this seeming quirkiness, other than bells supposedly toll at quarter hours - but I find it very charming. As an American, I’m a slave to time; I live and die by my iPhone. When I go for a run back home, I time my sprint intervals in precise 1-minute increments. I’m mortified if I’m 3 minutes late for a business call, mildly irritated if I’m kept waiting for more than 15 minutes at a doctor’s appointment – tapping my fingers impatiently if a traffic light goes 45 seconds longer than I expect, because it feels like an eternity. And I’m not alone. Even Google helpfully indexes this blog post as a 3 ½ minute read.

Our modern technology has made it possible for us to parse and dissect our lives into precise increments, and from a lifestyle standpoint, I’m honestly not sure if it’s a net gain or loss. On the one hand, I do like the accuracy. There’s comfort in the knowing, and reassurance in patterns. There’s also a modern sensibility that information is power: that if I know exactly where I stand in relation to each hour of my day, I’ll be in control and better able to leverage my productivity. Such accountability is useful in a complex modern world where the moving parts are exponential and our interactions cross time zones.

But precision is also a taskmaster. I have to wonder if we haven’t lost an important bit of our collective human breath in the march toward modern punctuality. There was an exhale tucked into the margins of the “approximate” time by which prior centuries of humans must have lived, worked and loved. Before the arrival of our technology-driven era, those equivocal church bells ordered the days of cities like Barcelona: their human interactions, obligations, celebrations and commerce. It must have been a world of “ish” time” … gatherings at noonish, business transactions at 3 pm-ish - with opportunities to re-set a natural part of the rhythm. Something other than precise timekeeping guided the ebb and flow of peoples’ lives.

Can you focus longer than this little guy?

Perhaps we moderns really are more productive as individuals. From information intake to the sheer number of our daily interactions and their associated responsibilities, we certainly have a lot more to juggle! But has our pinpoint attention to time made us a bit reductionist in how we interact with the world around us? A famous 2015 study by Microsoft found that the average human can really only concentrate for about 8 seconds before focus begins to wane - supposedly less than a goldfish. And, our capacity for attention reportedly is trending downward. There’s some debate surrounding these claims, but the way in which we moderns choose to interact with the flow of information does lend itself to compartmentalized thinking. We quantify seconds in a soundbite, words in a tweet, number of impressions in a scroll through our digital feeds - and yet somehow we are consuming more content than ever before in human history. Are we rewiring our brains to process information in a way that’s “a mile wide and an inch deep”?

There’s also the question of mental health. Studies show a negative correlation between the experience of perceived persistent time pressure and overall health. When fighting the unrelenting tick of the clock begins to feel like an inescapable way of life, it can contribute to chronic anxiety disorders, which affect more than 1 in 6 Americans.

Perhaps the bells of Barcelona were never intended to time-track in the way we think of it today. Perhaps they were designed simply to remind folks to keep moving forward while allowing for space to pause, look up, and take it all in - as they surely do for me.

My trusty iPhone will continue to get me through the whoosh of my days. But I hope that the church bells stay with me after I leave this place, a reminder to re-calibrate my inner cadence and slow down once in awhile. In a way, their music is a great allegory for time itself. We score music in notes, yet we experience it as melody. We may similarly “score” time in minutes, but we experience it as the timbre and rhythm of moments. Folded within those moments are lessons and memories that become part of us - just as the church bells are an inextricable part of Barcelona.