Miracles And Mulligans

I have been at my mother's place for my own private Easter Week and Stations of the Cross. I escaped at the beginning of Tre Ore services and made it back home. When I got home, I switched both computers on and basked in their glow, one rich and red like Gamma Crucis, the other mercurial silver like NGC 253, and the words pour forth.

After one hour, my mother called to inform me that my brother, who had just recently lost his wallet in an indiscretion and whose medical, insurance, and ID cards had been lost, had misplaced the new wallet I had bought him... filled with all the newly replaced medical, insurance, and ID cards I had newly procured for him.

I had been at my mother's since Wednesday, and we had been pouring over her papers and documents for two days straight, only stopping to go grocery shopping and to go to the post office to get letters in the mail before the 5:00 PM pick up.

They task me, this family of mine.

And I am quick to anger.

This is not a trial, this is not an affliction. It is a Mulligan. A Do-Over.

My first life was not perfect. In many respects it was OK, but in many important ones, it was and is severely flawed.
So I must engage with life and its problems, not flee from them as I so often did first time around.

Only by engaging intimately with Life in its important aspects can anyone be afforded the chance to experience things of the greatest value.
Many of us have done well in our lives, and we withdraw behind gated communities, and we shut ourselves away from the full array of life. In doing so, we ensure that certain bad things are excluded, but also we ensure that certain beneficial possibilities are also excluded. Whether the bad outweigh the good won't be known until a final reckoning.

This is what Kazantzakis wrote about in Zorba The Greek.
A life of dynamic engagement, not one of distance and flight and remoteness.

So I figure my second life is a Mulligan.
Or at least I get to bring my golf ball out of the rough and place it on the edge of the fairway, and no penalty strokes.

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