“Try Again”

In golf, when you lose a ball, you drop a new one and try again. When you put it in the water, you take the penalty and try again. When you chunk one off the first tee in front of a crowd, you take a breath, reload, and try again. The whole game is built on trying again.

Recovery works the same way. Except at some point, you have to actually do it.

A few weeks ago, I sat down and wrote a letter to one of my best friends. Not a text. Not a "hey man, we should catch up sometime" message that both of us would pretend was enough. A letter. The kind you write by hand because typing it would make it too easy to edit, and this needed to be unedited.

I apologized for the last five years.

Five years of fading away. Five years of not being there for him and his family when I should have been. Five years of not responding when he reached out. Not once. Not twice. Consistently. He'd call. I'd see it. I'd tell myself I'd call back. I wouldn't. He'd text. I'd read it. I'd convince myself I was too busy, too tired, too whatever excuse was closest to the surface. The truth is, I wasn't well enough to show up. Drinking is cunning, baffling, and powerful, and it let me believe it was perfectly ok to let go of an incredible friend for no reason at all.

That's what I did with this friendship. I watched it go. I took the loss. And I told myself it was just how things worked out. It wasn't. I hit it there. That was my shot. I own that.

So I wrote the letter. I sent it. And I sat there staring at my phone like a golfer watching a putt track toward the hole in slow motion, not breathing, not blinking, just waiting.

He called me immediately.

And he forgave me. For all of it.

I don't know if you've ever been on the receiving end of complete and total forgiveness from someone you wronged. It doesn't feel like relief. It feels like someone just handed you a brand new sleeve of Pro V1's and said, "Here. Try again." You don't deserve it. You know you don't deserve it. But there it is. In your hands.

That could have been the end of the story. Amends made. Forgiveness received. Move on. But here's the thing about recovery. There's a difference between making amends and living amends. Making amends is the letter. Living amends is what you do after.

So I booked a flight.

I flew out to be with him and his family. Not for a quick dinner. Not for a passing visit where we'd hug and say "let's do this more often" and then not. I went to stay. To be present. To start building something better than what was before.

And it's been beautiful in ways I didn't expect. Like waking up early and having his daughter greet me and ask to play card games at 6 AM. Just the best.

And where have we been talking? Where have we been sharing life, having deep and honest conversations, asking real questions, and sitting in that tender space where two grown men can actually be fully for one another?

The golf course. Obviously.

We've been playing a ton of golf. And when I say a ton, I mean my chiropractor will be able to buy a boat because of me. Worth every aching moment.

Because the golf course is one of those rare spaces where anything can happen. And I'm not talking about the four balls my friend put into the water on the last hole. I'm talking about the kind of anything that changes you. The five-minute walk between the green and the next tee where nobody says anything and then someone says everything. Just walking beside him, letting the silence do what silence does when two people trust each other with it.

The best rounds aren't the ones where everything goes right. They're the ones where you recover well.

That's what this trip has been. Recovery. Not the sobriety kind, although that's the foundation everything else is built on. The relational kind. The kind where you look your best friend in the eyes and say, "I wasn't there. I should have been. I'm here now. And I'm not going anywhere."

Some of the conversations required me to own more than I recognized. Some of them required me to sit in things I'd rather not sit in. Vulnerability is not my factory setting. Courage is not something I wake up with every morning. But golly, it's good. It's so good.

Taking a step of living amends requires a level of vulnerability that is genuinely scary. You're not just saying sorry. You're rebuilding from the studs. You're showing up and proving with your presence that you mean it. You're walking the course again with someone you walked away from, and this time you're not leaving.

And now, choosing to live amends is the start of what is to come. Not the finish line. The first tee.

So if you're sitting on a letter you haven't written yet, write it. If you're staring at a name in your phone you haven't called in too long, call them. If you've been telling yourself the friendship is a lost ball, go find it. It might still be in play. And even if it's sitting at the bottom of a water hazard, like four of my friend's balls on 18, it's worth getting your feet wet.

Not perfect, but good.