I found myself a couple weeks ago nearly getting into two fights on the golf course. Now if you knew me, I’m about as pacifist as they come and if anyone were to raise a fist, I would most certainly run the other way. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to stand up for myself when I feel I’m wronged. And I can get pretty heated about it. Much like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, who was unable to turn down a challenge where somebody called him, “chicken,” if someone yells at me for something that wasn’t my fault, . . . well . . . it’s on! Fortunately for me no fists were thrown, although there were prolific uses of the F word on one day and my friends pulling me away on another.

I made a mental note of my losing control and started the spiritual work of asking what it was about? I was right! (. . . that much I knew.) I was definitely in the right . . . and when you are right you should defend being right to the end, no letting anybody walk over you or impose their crap on you . . . right? It’s a matter of principle.

But then I heard some guy on the radio over the weekend as I was flipping channels . . . he sounded a bit New Agey for my taste, but he hit me dead on when he said, “If anybody says something that causes you to overreact or get defensive, it’s because there is a kernel of truth in what they’re saying that resonates with you on some level. It may be something that you don’t want to admit, but it’s not them that’s the enemy, it’s a piece of truth about yourself that you don’t want to embrace.”

I learned early on in therapy that my two default reactions to preserve my sick ego are anger and hero pursuit. Mostly in childhood, I stuffed my anger, but as an adult, anger became a tremendously effective if not limited tool in my arsenal to combat an unjust world. The secret emotion that I never wanted to feel was hurt. I never wanted to be weak. It may be the emotion I was legitimately feeling at the time, but I had no place for it. We Witzemans buck up and move on. As Monty Python’s medieval knight says after getting his arm chopped off, “It’s only a flesh wound.” But “hurt” is probably the most honest and healthy emotion to feel because it keeps things from escalating and centers me in a way that puts me back on the spiritual path.

So now because there are no coincidences and God has created a synchronistic universe, of course I would get another test a week later. I was playing the tricky 8^th hole at Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena and managed to hit two balls into the water. The first in the lake fronting the green and the second in the man made cement water runoff to the left of the green. Seeing as how I could retrieve the second, when I got to the green I walked down the cement embankment and scooped my ball out of the water. No sooner had I done this, did I hear, “Don’t be pickin up somebody else’s ball, that’s not your ball, what are you doin pickin up somebody else’s ball.” It was Hunter, the homeless guy chewing on a rib bone sitting on a crate. (He has found a home where money actually rolls down the water to his front door, where he industriously bags the money in the form of golf balls and sells them for a fraction of what it would cost new.) “No,” I doth protested, “I earned this one, I hit it in myself.” “No you didn’t,” Hunter’s voice began rising, “You took somebody else’s ball. There are a lot of golfers here that are a LOT better than you and when they hit their ball in the water, they just let it go and they LEARN from their mistakes. Let that ball go down the river, and you won’t make that mistake again!!! You don’t know sh#t and you certainly don’t know how to play golf!!!”

I felt the heat and the tension move up through my chest and into the front of my face and I was all ready to let him have it . . . when the radio guy came into my head and some old training from Alanon taught me the simple response, “You may be right,” and “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” Now mind you, that wasn’t what I wanted to say, but I did out of some quest for sanity. The events of the previous week had rented too much time in my head to do that again. I guess, you can either be right or you can be sane, it’s your choice and I was hoping for sanity.

I’m no saint. As I walked away and he kept going on and on about what a terrible golfer and philosophical weakling I was, I decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I started a rant of my own. “When I had my first lesson ever, I can remember the wondrous things that that teacher did tell me and I said why couldn’t I see that before and he showed me how to hold the club and then how to turn as if in a phone booth and . . .

He looked at me with that look that says, “Oh my God, this guys crazier than I am,” and got real quiet.

So besides a little sanity, now I had some peace and quiet as I walked to the next tee.

A rather blurry view of Hunter and his home.