I’ve never been pepper sprayed, and I consider myself fortunate for never having that particular experience.

Today, however, I think I may have encountered the next best (worst?) thing. Regularly when I’m feeling a bit of crud coming on, I take a packet or two of Emergen-C with a spoonful of my homemade fire cider (here’s the recipe, if you dare!) and perhaps a dropper of one or more herbal tinctures, and mix them all with about 1/4 cup water in a small glass. Then I slam it down. Usually it’s a little firey but not altogether unpleasant, and the burn lasts about 15 seconds.

However, this afternoon the experience was slightly different. As I tipped my head back to drink, instead of swallowing for some reason the mixture decided to rapidly migrate up into my nasal cavity.

And at that point my head very nearly exploded.

It’s been a long damn time since I’ve felt that much pain and discomfort. Even though I spit out most of the mixture, the damage was done. I can’t really even describe the agony that comes from a mixture of a half-dozen dried peppers, garlic, ginger and vinegar rapidly flooding through your sinuses, but I can say this:

Do not try this at home!

Immediately my body tried to flush the irritants through a rush of tears and mucus. Blowing my nose the first time was painful, and left a red tissue that almost looked like blood. For the next, I don’t know, 15 minutes, I alternated between swigging milk to try to cool the burn in my throat and upper palate and blowing my nose. It took well over an hour, and a long bath, before all of the capsaicin and other assorted bits cleared my system, and even now I feel a bit funny.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here, other than to respect your own homemade remedies. Even the seemingly most benign herbal treatments can come back to bite you in the ass (or in my case, the nose) if you aren’t careful.

In the board game Monopoly you can erase all penalties for criminal behavior with a simple card that lets you get out of jail free.

Wouldn’t it be great if real life worked the same way? Every so often as you went about your daily business, you’d get a free pass that you could use right away or save for a dire emergency, and as soon as you showed your pass, your mistakes or bad luck would be erased and you could go about your life as if nothing had happened?

I was prompted to write about this after a friend’s Facebook post that led me to comment, “you have to make your own “get out of jail free cards”. No one hands them out.” And then I stopped and realized the truth in what I had just said.

In life we don’t get a free pass… but if we’re clever and think ahead, we can come up with strategies for handling potentially unpleasant meetings (which is what had prompted the conversation), unfortunate life events (losing a job, having your car break down, inclement weather, or whatever), or whatever other lemons life hands you. It’s not about “making lemonade” as the saying goes, necessarily… it’s about two things: preparing in advance and then having the resiliency, personal strength, and guts to keep going after the shit hits the fan.

As I look back over the past year, that’s something I’ve definitely been learning, and working on improving, for my own life. It doesn’t happen overnight, but slowly and surely I’m getting there. The physical preparedness, I’ve discovered, is almost always easier for me than summoning up the physical strength and mental discipline/courage to deal with situations… but in the end, the goal is for both to become second-nature.

Because in the end, I may only get one chance to get it right.