Drift Reality > London, England > A Fox in London

I was walking back from my gym near the UCL campus earlier today when I was startled by a rustling sound coming from the park directly adjacent to where I was walking. I turned to my right and was shocked to see a fox staring at me through the fence that surrounded the park.

It is a funny thing, the exhilarating realization that you are looking at a species for the first time, mingled with a sort of sense that what you are looking at is completely out of place. Mind you, its immediate frame made sense: grass and bushes. It was the superimposition of the chain metal fence that set the image of the fox amiss.

It was also the presence of the chain fence that made me realize that I didn’t have to run away shrieking like a school girl.

The fox looked directly at me and gingerly stepped forward. I stared at the crack underneath the fence and swiftly realized there was no way the fox was going to be able to lunge at me and bite my nuts off, so I relaxed. The fox took another step forward and began gnawing at something in the ground. I gazed incredulously at the creature only five feet in front of me.

It was funny that my third instinct – after wonderment and fear – was to swivel my head around and find someone to share the experience with. To my right I saw a tall guy with curly hair, who I recognized from my gym, walking towards the fox and myself. My mind flashed back to several weeks ago, when I had observed the guy practicing taekwondo kicks in front of the mirror and I quickly decided to look in the opposite direction while the guy passed by without batting an eye.

A young girl was walking towards me from the other direction. She slowed down as she approached, realizing there was some reason that I was standing in front of a fenced-off park desperately turning my head as if wanting to share a secret with someone.

“Say,” I blurted. “Have you ever seen a fox here before?”

A bemused grin overtook her face as she responded: “No, not in London.”

Good - she had a British accent. If anyone would know what was going on in this God forsaken city it was her.

“I wonder how it got here,” I asked.

“It probably knew that there wasn’t anyone in the park.”

I suddenly realized that the park had been closed for renovations for the past month or so. Where the hell could it have come from? Regents Park?

Looking back to the fox, I realized it looked more scrawny than the images I had seen in photos. “Is it okay?” I asked.

I’m not entirely sure why I felt that she was the expert on foxes, but I continued my barrage of questions before she had a chance to answer. “Are they normally that skinny?”

I made sure to emphasize my American accent, just to make it clear that I wasn’t intrinsically stupid, just unaware of urban wildlife in London.

“I’m not really sure,” she responded, with a slight chuckle.

We both stood there for several more moments before the fox dashed off into another part of the park.

“I hope its okay,” I answered.

“Yeah,” the girl responded. We both stood awkwardly for several more moments before she began moving.

“Well, bye,” she said.

I didn’t respond as she walked away. It just seemed like a peculiar thing to do.

After she left, my first thought was to go to the student hall cafeteria and get some food for the fox (which did seem a little undernourished). I realized that the cafeteria was probably closed and the fox would probably have disappeared anyway by the time I returned.

My second thought, obviously, was that the fox in the park was a sign from God that I shouldn't worry about the fact that I scored a "low merit" on one of my papers today because the teacher (I'm not going to call her a professor) mistook “creativity” for a “lack of structure.”

Then again, people get confused every day. After all, someone decided to give her a job at a prestigious University. We all make mistakes.

At any rate, I recall a speech that a professor (a real one) gave at the Next Generation Entrepreneurs Forum in Monaco, which I attended several months ago. I remember him passionately explaining how the institute of academia crushes creativity and individualism. I remember him stating how his litany of failures encompassed his greatest learning experiences, which had helped him develop and evolve as a person.

The context of his message was the spirit of entrepreneurship begins with a realization that there is a deep pattern, a schenkerian pattern, which underlies all the shitty little passing notes and accidentals of everyday life.

You can agonize over the fact that someone criticized your work because you didn’t have “good transitions between ideas,” or you can say “to hell with it,” and look at something bigger.

My first day in this program, I got up in front of the department and asked if we were allowed to put together a documentary film in lieu of a written dissertation. The lecture convener reacted as though I had gotten up and diarrhead on my desk.

“Err…you need to follow the departmental guidelines on the dissertation, although you are welcome to submit supplementary materials.” (Translation: shut up and stop asking stupid questions).

The park in the middle of London is about the size of a city block. It has nothing for the fox except for maybe a few scraps of food that have been left behind. It is confined and limiting in what it allows the fox to do.

The fox looks out of place in the park because his natural habitat is the forest. If he wants any action, that’s where he must go.