Today I’m thinking about the two minds with which most of us navigate the world. One of them is rational and cool; it checks facts and weighs options. The other is emotional and warm-blooded; facts slip through its fingers. There are different ways of describing these entities: reasoning and intuition, higher brain and lower brain, the elephant and the rider.

It’s the last one that sticks in my mind. I first learned about the elephant and rider in Jonathan Haidt’s The RIghteous Mind, which did more to explain our political polarization than any book I’ve read.

Yesterday, I was riding the elephant. I climbed aboard midday and didn’t dismount for several hours. It’s tempting now to second-guess every action I took during that fraught time, but I will try to avoid that trap. I’ll focus instead on the perils of elephant riding. Today, I promise to keep my feet on the ground.

(Photo: A bull elephant in Kruger National Park. Rob Hooft, Wikimedia Commons)