As you arrive,
Find your way into your body.
Take a deep breath in and let it go.
One more inhale and exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I love the word mulligan.
I love how it sounds.
I love what it means.
This word appears to have originated on a golf course when some man named Mulligan teed off,
Took a bad shot,
Re-teed,
And took another one without penalty.
If you've ever golfed,
You know that the sport is ripe for the creation story of the word mulligan.
You can want your ball to go high and long right down the middle of the fairway,
But what might actually happen is you whiff mightily,
Or you tap the little bugger of a ball and it goes three pathetic feet away from you,
All while your friends are watching.
Inhale.
Exhale.
You simply erase something like that.
Isn't that a delightful thought?
As I've been thinking about the word mulligan,
One of the key parts involved is the idea of face.
What scholar Irving Goffman says is the self-image we present to the world.
Imagine you are walking down a sidewalk and you trip.
When you get up,
You look around to see who saw you take a header.
That's face.
And there are several parts of face that are at work in a mulligan.
First of all,
Face has an emotional component.
If we give good face,
As Madonna says,
We move on,
Pleased as punch with ourselves,
And we feel good.
If we screw up,
If we say the wrong thing or suddenly notice we've had a bugger hanging out of our noses for the entire conversation,
We want to crawl in a hole and die.
Nothing else.
Most of us are very concerned about protecting our own faces.
That's why we choose our words with care and feel horribly when we say the wrong thing.
And we curse the fact that there is no delete buttons on our tongues,
Just like I'm doing right now because I said the word sing instead of thing.
We want to make a good impression and save our own faces.
But here's what's interesting.
In general,
We also want to protect other people's faces.
That's why the bugger is such a dilemma.
I'm serious.
We don't know which is worse,
To tell or not to tell.
We generally don't want to cause another person embarrassment or harm.
Inhale,
Exhale,
And enter the mulligan.
You do something and it goes so badly.
It is such a threat to your face that everybody around you is just going to pretend it didn't happen.
Now,
Inhale,
Exhale,
And do it again.
Notice how there are a couple of things at play here.
First,
You have to screw up,
And we all do that.
We all make mistakes because we are human.
But we have to screw up in such a way that people want to make sure you feel okay about yourself.
This deals with that emotional component of face.
You have to have sucked so badly that people know you're going to be beating yourself up for it.
Secondly,
The people around you have to be the kind of people who care less about competition and more about compassion,
Taking care of this other who is profoundly embarrassed.
That work in a mulligan,
Then,
Is a sense of grace.
There is a benevolence to it,
A care for the other,
A letting go of what was,
A chance for a completely fresh start with no penalties.
Inhale,
Exhale.
I don't know about you,
But God,
I love the idea of a mulligan.
To act,
To fail as we are wont to do as humans,
But to do so in a space that is absent of judgment and consequences,
A space that is imbued with kindness,
A good naturedness.
Yep,
Wow,
Did that suck.
Now here's your chance to do it again.
What a sense of freedom.
So what I'm going to say next will probably come as no surprise.
Wouldn't life be better if we all gave ourselves an unlimited amount of mulligans and did the same for others?
Inhale,
Exhale.
But we live in the real world,
So we cannot ignore the obvious.
That sometimes there are consequences to our actions,
No matter how much we wish there weren't.
So yeah,
There are consequences sometimes that can't be denied,
But can we,
As much as we are able,
Give as many mulligans to ourselves and others as we can?
Wouldn't that take a heck of a lot of pressure off of all of us?
Inhale,
Exhale.
Swing hard.
I mean it,
In life.
Swing hard.
Go for it.
Live,
Reach,
Run,
Burst open wide.
And if you trip or fall or whiff as you swing at whatever real or metaphorical ball you are aiming for,
Be gentle with yourself.
Surround yourself with friends who love you,
Who care for you,
And in unison,
Cry mulligan.
And then try,
Try again.
Namaste.
