Werner Ulrich's Home Page:  Ulrich's Bimonthly

Formerly "Picture of the Month"

July-August 2006

Slowdown  Summer time, vacation time. The FIFA World Cup is over, we can take a break. Time for slowing down, for gaining some distance. Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say.  

Slowdown is also the order of the day for my "Picture of the Month" series: With the present page, I am completing three straight years of offering a monthly reflection centered around a picture. Time to review and renew the series a bit.

For a hyperlinked overview of all issues of "Ulrich's Bimonthly" and the previous "Picture of the Month" series, see the site map

From the "Picture of the Month" to "Ulrich's Bimonthly" In the age of weblogs, pictures of the month risk looking slightly out of touch and certainly very, very, slow. I have therefore been pondering the question: Do I need to speed up and go blogging?

My answer is a big No-No. I am not a blogger and I don't aim to be one. Here are some of the reasons:

• A blog is a kind of online diary; I have no intention of writing a diary, much less of making it public.
• Bloggers, I suspect, write primarily for themselves; I want to write for you. As I said in the introduction to this series, in August 2003, the idea is to encourage my visitors (as much as myself) "to enjoy moments of conscious relaxation and reflection, so as to keep or regain a healthy distance from everyday routine."
• Bloggers like talking about themselves; I prefer to talk about philosophical and other reflections that I find helpful for promoting reflective practice, whether in research and professional practice or in everyday life, although I may do so in a personal way and do not mean to limit my topics of reflection in any predefined way. I certainly may like to say something on my own account occasionally, as is the case in this current reflection.
• Last but not least, bloggers obviously think and write fast; whereas I tend to think and write slowly. As everyone and everything around me appears to be speeding up, I find it attractive to slow down. As the imperative of writing and publishing as quickly as possible (a.q.a.p.) is ever more taking hold of academic work and life, I find it necessary to free myself of the short-winded format of a monthly publication. As I am slowly getting a nuance older, the months are anyway passing faster, so that a monthly format risks becoming inconvenient (not to say breathless) rather than relaxed and easy-going as it should be.
  

Lest I overstate my case against blogging: blogging has its charms. You'll occasionally catch me reading other people's blogs! Among other qualitites, blogging is fun, it's refreshingly informal and free, it's committed to open access, and it's never deadly serious. Insofar, the idea of my regular reflection-cum-picture page (thus far called "Picture of the Month") is not so far away from blogging. It's just that issue of speed, along with my "philosophical" rather than "psychological" bent, that make the difference. My interest is neither in daily psychological navel-gazing nor in offering some kind of fast-food philosophy. It is, rather, in (occasionally) trying some new and informal ways of writing about reflective research and practice or other issues of topical interest, so as to break out of academic routine and, perhaps (who knows?), even to encourage some of my visitors to think about these issues although they may not care to read my academic stuff.

Hence, against the current trend towards blogging and other uses of the Internet that tend to accelerate the rhythm of life, I have decided to slow down the format of my regular page. A bimonthly rather than monthly format appears perfectly fast enough for the time being. Furthermore, although I enjoy using pictures as a stimulus and intend to continue doing so,  I see no need to make the format depend on a (monthly or bimonthly) picture. A change of name is, then, in order. The "Picture of the Month" is dead, long live Ulrich's Bimonthly!

Time for a site upgrading  As my site is attracting more visitors, it has happened increasingly that it exceeded its bandwidth (or data transfer) limit and was then temporarily unavailable. I have now added considerably more bandwith, so that this occasional problem should be a thing of the past. On this occasion, I also have upgraded the site to an ads-free site and refreshed the layout of most pages.

Time-out  Summer time. Beautiful word! Makes me think of so many pleasurable things. Of life at its best. Of simple but essential things, like having time for oneself; being lazy as one pleases. Of slowing down; getting rid of time pressures and commitments; freeing oneself from all those many – too many – "too muches" that seem to belong to our (supposedly) modern life-style:

• too much multitasking and workaholism ...
• too much ambition, perhaps?
• too much coffee, sweets, TV consumption ...
• too much seditary life-style ...
• too much Internet surfing, email correspondence, SMS writing ...
• in the past few weeks, too much football (FIFA World Cup) ...
• too much of so many other things that are not really essential (too much is bad by definition).

Summer time: Do less, enjoy more. Forget multitasking, discover simplicity. Yes, I suspect simplicity is the secret. It's when the simple pleasures of summer take over, such as relaxing in a garden armchair, sitting in a street café, or swimming in a cool river or lake, that we really begin to free ourselves from all those many too muches, only to disover that nothing is missing! It's a bit like learning to live a duck's life ... a happy duck's life ... a good life. Enjoy the summer!

Picture data  Digital photograph taken on 1 September 2004 shortly before noon at the Aare river near Bern, exposure time 1/200 seconds, aperture f/4.5, ISO 50, focal length 19.25 mm (equivalent to 86 mm with a conventional 35 mm camera). Original resolution 2272 x 1704 pixels; current resolution 700 x 531 pixels, compressed to 90.2 KB.

July-August, 2006

 Time-out

„It's a Duck's Life”

(Children's picture book by Michael Bedard, London 2002;
also title of a children's comics book series, New York 1950-1952)

Notepad for capturing personal thoughts  »

Last updated 22 May 2010 (layout; first published 7 July 2006)
https://wulrich.com/bimonthly_july2006.html