The Holy Do-Over

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, we played a lot of games that were improvised versions of the serious, canonical games that we saw played on television. There was stickball which looked like baseball with a broomstick bat and a pink 'spaldeen' ball. it was played in the street, usually with a manhole cover as home plate and temporary bases assigned to car doors or fire hydrants. the rules were sort of ad-hoc and in the absence of umpires, there were a lot of disputed calls. since the game was far more important than the outcome, we never let a disagreement over a fair or foul ball stop play.

If we couldn't agree on a call, the most common result was an agreement to do it over. Once both sides acknowledge that the other isn't willing to concede and neither is interested in taking the ball and going home, we'd agree: 'okay, it's a do-over'. A do-over wasn't, of course, a replay of the original event: that would have been impossible. Instead, a do-over was a completely fresh iteration of the opportunity that had just occurred. It's still two strikes and one out and you're still up and we take it from there.

A Holy Do-Over in a relationship is a little like that. Something bad happened: something where neither of you did your best and the outcome isn't very satisfying. He was accusatory, she was defensive. He sulked, she yelled. She was unkind, he was deaf. The outcome sucked, you both feel terrible. Chances are that you can't unwind the event, you can't blot it out and your mutual failure sits like a smelly embarrassment between you. You can't have an Undo, but you can have a Do-Over.

A Do-Over is an agreement to suspend your feelings for the moment, to see them as mere artifacts of a need, whiskers to be shaved off and allowed to grow back in a different color and texture. In a Do-Over you return to your needs, consider your love, take up your courage and act the way you might have acted the first time if you had been true to yourself.

Of course, the kind of Do-Over we're talking about here has higher stakes than the street ball version.You're playing with each other's humanity, which is to say that your staking your own on the outcome. In a Holy Do-Over, everybody wins.

Guidelines for a useful Holy Do-Over

•wait as long as you need to, but no longer

one necessary pre-condition is that both of you have taken a step back from where you were emotionally. you now see your behavior as a 'thing-you-did' and not as 'you'. As long as you're still identifiied with what you just did and said, you can only have a Repeat, which is not the same as a Do-Over.

with practice, the latency period can be very short. Couples who have learned to play the game can sometimes regroup immediately as both of them realize that their best selves weren't operating.

•replicate, don't duplicate

in so far as you can return to the place where the first event happened, do so. if you can make the situation similar in any other way, good for you. it's a mistake to strive for cinematic perfection though. For one thing, all that obsessing just gets in the way. More importantly, you want cues in the environment that tell you that this is new, that you are free to do and be as you didn't the last time.

•immerse yourself in the feeling, but don't rehearse.

the point of a do-over is to enlist your best self to show up and be you. one way to scare that best self away is to give yourself a script.

it doesn't matter if you wrote the script or if you borrowed it from someone else: a re-do is not a performance, it's a natural emanation 

of your reflected, refined essential self. if you be you, but don't be rehearsed.

Magic has responsibilities. 

Religions have forbidden magic for a reason. Salem witches, ecc. the magician abrogates the powers of the divine: 

in truth the magician commands what the religious supplicant begs for. 

When you mess around with the laws of  nature, you're very much obliged to respect the outcomes of  your experiments.

so what you're doing here is dangerous stuff: powerful and sacred. done frivolously, it won't work; done half-seriously it could make you crazy.

you're playing around with two natural laws. 

first, you're denying time; you're going backwards by acting as if time hadn't elapsed and you have your hands on the hands of the clock.

second, you're screwing with cause and effect. you're taking the effect of some previous act and using it as the cause of the original act itself.

(stay with me now) your do-over is an effect that's (in effect) becoming the cause of its own cause.

dizzy yet? good.

so that's why you have to approach the act of the do-over with a certain gravity if not outright reverence. you're bending the laws of nature for your own interests. make sure it's worth it. don't joke, pray.