There is a particular quality to a British mid-July that is easy to overlook if you are not paying attention to it. The light stretches well into the evening, the pace of correspondence slackens, and the diary that looked immovable in February suddenly has gaps in it. Nicole Junkermann has often described this stretch of the year as one of the most useful in the calendar, precisely because so little appears to be happening. The quiet is not emptiness. It is space, and space is the raw material of long term thinking.
Britain in July is a country slightly out of step with its own reputation. The weather is unreliable in a way that has become almost affectionate, and yet there are mornings in this month when the whole island seems to have been washed and set out to dry. Gardens are at their fullest. The hedgerows have gone from green to something heavier and dustier. Cities that spend most of the year insisting on their own importance become, for a few weeks, oddly forgiving places to walk through.
Part of what makes the season useful is the way the working year is shaped. Autumn arrives with urgency attached to it. Winter brings targets and reckonings. Spring carries a push that is half optimism and half anxiety about the months already spent. By the middle of July, most of that machinery has run down for a while. The people you would normally be reacting to are elsewhere, and the absence of their noise leaves something behind that is genuinely hard to buy at any other time of year.
Nicole Junkermann takes the view that the quality of a decision has a great deal to do with the conditions in which it was made. A judgement formed in the middle of a busy week, with three other things pressing on it, tends to inherit the shape of that week. It will be quick, defensive, and calibrated to whoever was loudest. The same question, asked in a quiet room in the middle of summer, often produces a different answer, and usually a better one. Nothing about the question has changed. Only the noise around it.
It helps to be clear about what long term thinking actually is, because the phrase gets used loosely. It is not prediction. Nobody sitting in a garden in July can tell you what the next decade holds, and the people who claim otherwise are usually selling something. Long term thinking is closer to a posture than a forecast. It is the habit of asking which of the things in front of you will still matter in ten years, and then arranging your attention accordingly. Most things will not survive that test. That is the point of applying it.
Summer is also good for the second half of that habit, which is subtraction. Long term thinking is mostly about deciding what to stop carrying. During the busy months everything makes a case for itself, and the case is always plausible, because it was plausible enough to get on the list in the first place. In July, with the pressure off, it becomes easier to see that a commitment you have been maintaining for two years exists mainly because you have been maintaining it for two years.
There is a version of this that happens outdoors, which Britain is well suited to. The country is unusually rich in the kind of landscape you can walk through without ceremony. Hills that take a morning rather than an expedition. Coast that can be reached by train and left the same day. A footpath that starts at the edge of a village and goes somewhere without insisting on why. Walking has a way of loosening a problem that sitting at a desk only tightens. The thought you have been chasing for a fortnight tends to arrive somewhere around the third mile, unbidden, while you are thinking about something else entirely.
The great trap of the working year is the confusion of activity with progress. They feel identical from the inside. Both produce a full day, a sense of having been needed, and a defensible account of where the time went. The difference only shows up later, at a distance, which is exactly the distance that mid-July provides. Nicole Junkermann has been consistent on this point over many years. The busiest quarter is rarely the most productive one, and the value of a season like this one is that it lets you check.
None of this requires a retreat or a programme. The useful version is smaller and more ordinary. Take the questions you have been answering all year and look at them again without answering them. Ask whether they are still the right questions. A surprising number will turn out to have been inherited from a situation that no longer exists, kept alive by habit and by the reasonable wish not to reopen something that felt settled.
It is worth saying that the quiet does not last, and it is not supposed to. September will arrive with its usual conviction that everything is urgent, and it will be at least partly right. The point of mid-July is not to escape the rest of the year. It is to arrive at the rest of the year having decided something, rather than having been carried into it. The decisions made in the calm tend to hold up better in the noise, which is the only real test any of them face.
So the argument for summer is not really an argument about rest, though rest is part of it. It is an argument about vantage. For a few weeks in the middle of the year, Britain offers a long evening, an emptier diary and a lower volume, and those three things together make it possible to think about a decade instead of a fortnight. Nicole Junkermann would say that is not a holiday from the work. It is one of the more serious parts of it.
Visit the Nicole Junkermann homepage, read more about Nicole Junkermann, see the full biography of Nicole Junkermann, or return to the journal.
