The ape response is emotional: “I AM BETTER APE!” Like when you have opinions on something and are then challenged on those opinions and you get angry: “I CAN THINK WHAT I WANT BECAUSE I AM JUST AS GOOD IF NOT BETTER APE THAN YOU!”

The angel response, however, is thoughtful and seeks understanding. This actually takes more strength because sometimes you really, really want to be the “better ape”. And then you let that go, so when someone challenges you you don’t start saying: “Well clearly, you just haven’t looked at it properly; clearly you must be the fool here, the ape in this analogy, while I’m — as you can tell by my clear diction and my attention to punctuation — a thoughtful, considerate, well-read, well-informed….angel.”

Being a smug, self-righteous jerk doesn’t put you on the side of the angels. You may know all the facts, and you may be articulate — but your smug response just makes you a clever ape.

“I AM NOT APE! I AM ANGEL!”

Sure you are.

The ape is emotion. Animals use emotion for all their decisions. Because they’re animals. If you want to get biblical, think of the animal as a stage of the shaping-up of the human being as we’re being made from the dust of the ground. Start with the requisite dirt, add water, heat, oxygen (the breath of life), knead it into prokaryotes, eukaryotes, then shape that life into sponges, coral, then wiggly animals like worms and mollusks. Add the spine and you’ve got fishes. Shape some fish into amphibians, and that’s when brains start coming into fashion. Our primal brain, our basal ganglia, the root of our survival and procreative instincts, are shared by other earth-dwellers with a backbone. Now, wrap that primal brain with a periaqueductal gray. This is the part of the brain that makes cats act like cats and otters act like otters. Then wrap THAT in a neocortex, which is needed for problem-solving. And then, finally, there is a big boost in the prefrontal cortex, which is where our real self-awareness, our awareness of how we fit into our group, is figured out. Dogs have a prefrontal cortex. Bats have it. Wolves have it. Whales have it. And it’s really big in primates. And it’s huge in human beings.

Here’s the thing though: our prefontal cortex is not the root of our emotions. That would be a combination of the amygdala, the insula, and the periaqueductal gray, same as all other mammals on the planet, and a bunch of other animals as well. Our prefrontal cortex is our awareness of others and our self-control. And it’s right behind what the new-agers consider our third-eye. It’s the looking-out, of being aware and clear on those around you.

The third-eye concept, by the way, is just a metaphor. But some people believe it’s real — like real world magic — like an other-dimensional eye inside your skull. It isn’t. It’s a metaphor for being very aware of others and knowing how they are doing emotionally. You can read people based on how they act. We all can do that. Ever walk into a room when your dad’s sitting there or your mom, totally silent, and you can tell how incredibly angry they are about….something? That’s third-eye stuff. It ain’t magic. It’s built into us.

But you can only “open it” when you’re calm. That’s the trick. Once you get angry, once you let the ape call the shots, you’ll lose clarity. It’ll become all about you and your poor animal feelings.

You may be formed from the dust and to the dust you will return, but your entire human construction makes you incredibly complex and intricate dust. You border on the divine, but you have to get out of the mud, stand upright, and reach out, if you want to touch it.

On the verge of the water of the Serpentine we walked. And the police gathered and moved in for reasons we couldn’t understand, swinging our arms loose and occasionally twining our fingers together.

LOOK LEFT read the lazy-printed paint on the edge of the crosswalk, dusk giving way to darkness, and we looked left as more officers, this time riding motorcycles, wailed by. Down along the edge we continued — curious and wanting to know more: what’s going on?

I remained delighted by the Old World aspect of the place: the single stone house in Hyde Park with a black iron fence surrounding it, the sign on the gate proclaiming it to be a private residence and therefore No Trespassing, was a favorite. Who gets to live in Hyde Park? What does it take to be able to procure that particular abode? I want it.

We approached the southeastern edge of the Serpentine and the crowd, which we vaguely understood to be large before, coalesced into something much more impressive. Three female officers went by, shoulder-to-shoulder and walking fast, and my wife tried to ask them what was going on — to which their only reply was: You don’t want to go that way! But we did, because, what the hell was going on down there? But when we got closer, some fifty-yards out, we realized that we couldn’t actually take our intended route down to Hyde Corner; there was no way through that mob. So we turned northward — and that was when they all scattered, the mob sprinting suddenly outward, an explosion of running limbs and torsos, frightened faces (although some laughed as they ran), and we watched over our shoulders as we moved — much more quickly now, not wanting to give in to any panic, but right on the edge of panic regardless — people from the crowd now running towards us.

On the other side of the Old Police Lodge we approached a bobby, in his high-domed blue helmet, and asked if he knew what was going on. He didn’t, he said. It started, he believed, as an undocumented music concert and escalated out of control. It was all he knew (and he was wrong, we discovered much later). We asked him the way out of the park, and he pointed towards the northeastern corner, and so that is the way we went.

Once we got to the Speaker’s Corner, everything seemed normal. People walking and bicycling along the Broadwalk, a group of young people singing and playing a guitar under a shelter — all seemed fine.

7/25/16 — GRANTCHESTER, ENGLAND

The sorry breath of a green day, brought in through the nostrils with a flare and sniffle — something easily confused by those passing by along the garden path as a sneer and a snarl. But no — it’s all about the despair of joy. No moment lasts and even a walk along the River Cam, with its slow, slow current, and the trees curling around the banks, slender limbs reaching out, or the droop of the weeping willows, sorrowful and stately behind their small fences, and under a sky that has finally gone delightfully blue, must eventually come to a close. The warmth of my wife’s smooth palm against mine, fingers loose around hers, our daughter telling us a story, playful and articulate, is colored with a darker shade of purple, the awareness that the moment will pass.

The desire, as always, is to stay to the moment. But the challenge of that, with the rush of thoughts of what must come next or how the moment compares to others, can be difficult and pull you, like a turnip, ripped up from the cool soil and into the naked air.

Sleep wraps up like a snake in shade — a stretch of muscle and strength sated and content, curling in on itself and forgetting. And it all ticks down and is forgotten, save for a freshly colored dream that gives you something clean to reflect on come the morning.

Walking through Cambridge, I thought often about the desire I had to write first and with it find a way to open up the possibilities. My wife had set up the entire trip and I wonder what it might be like to spring at something with teeth bared and laughter already jumping from the throat — to attack the moment with abandon with nary a thought beyond. The seed stirs in the hand but the hand is uncertain how to plant it.

A father went by us this afternoon as we made our way back to Balls Grove, shuffling along Grantchester Meadow lane, a narrow street lined with old-style row houses, walking with his son and daughter. His son, a boy of maybe ten, stayed by his side, but his daughter, a teenaged girl with long dark hair and wearing blue shorts, said something while they were still behind us that I couldn’t catch.

The father said, “You go ahead, Elena, just don’t kick on any sticks.”

At least, that’s what we think he said. It didn’t make any sense to us. But it was the affirmative that the daughter seemed to need, because she suddenly ran past us, up on the curb where there was no pavement only gravel. She ran with feet splayed, leaning way too far forward, and with incredible energy, hair bouncing off her shoulders and back.

“She ran,” I muttered to my wife and daughter, once the father and son were well past, “like she was right on the verge of face-planting. Just — skoosh! and then up and bloody. She ran vaguely out of control. She ran with incredible faith.”

My daughter laughed at that last one.

Elena didn’t face-plant. She disappeared around the bend and her father and brother soon did likewise, moving comfortable and calm, also, apparently, having faith that she would arrive to wherever she was going without a scratch.

After dinner, we sat, the three of us, in the living room of our cottage.

“If you don’t know,” said my wife to my daughter, “if you want to go for your masters yet, and if your boyfriend wants, truly, to come to the US for a stretch, you don’t have to. Come back to the States with him and wander the country. Go on a barista tour from city-to-city, just picking up jobs in coffeeshops and staying for awhile before moving on. Or go to Door County and he can try and move his art in the shops or in a tent at the different art festivals around the penisula. Nothing needs to be set in stone.”

And then Grace told her story of the young woman from New Mexico who her friend Alex had met down in New Zealand — a young lady who had taken to communicating to Gracie through social media and was hoping to get some advice on how to make the move to Barcelona. My wife then mentioned all the connections she had around the world, and that traveling was something that was open to all of us — if we wanted.

And then there is me. Curious to know what it might be like to run, duck-footed and reckless on loose gravel and experience only the joy of the movement and the burn of the air in the lungs and to not concern myself always with the next moment — that moment when it it is finally revealed that everything might actually just go to shit. What might such confidence feel like?

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