Everybody else has had something to say about it, so I’ve decided to weigh in on Tiger Wood’s fall from grace. His situation fits into something I’ve been thinking about since a coffee date with a friend one day last week. Columnists, sports writers, and social commentators have been quick with their responses to the world's most famous athlete’s private misbehaviors and his painful public reemergence into the glare of media’s rude spotlights. Some treat him like a god fallen. Others proclaim that he has always been as much a jerk as he is now. On the same day that I met with my friend in the morning, Tiger Wood’s confession was a lead story on evening television newscasts. As I watched his scripted performance before a small invited audience and a cluster of TV cameras, I was struck by the fact that he was acting out the process Ben and I had discussed over coffee. He serially screwed up. He got caught. He experienced public exposure, humiliation and shame. He said he was sorry and apologized. But it’s obviously not enough.

As far as I know he didn’t break any laws. Reports indicate his sex with women other than his wife was consensual. His wife knows. Sports companies that have paid him for the use of his name now have some business decisions to make; they are business decisions, not decisions that have anything to do with the corporate world’s “feeling” for him or his wife or for anyone else. If corporations decide to stop paying him for the use of his name, that’s their business; it’s business, not moral judgment. A few days ago when the Dalai Lama was asked by a reporter what he thought about the Tiger Wood situation, he answered, “What is tiger wood?” Good answer. The Dalai Lama doesn’t live in a cave, so he probably knows very well who Tiger Wood is; his was the right answer. It is a private, civil matter which has nothing to do with me.

My friend and I didn’t discuss Tiger Wood or any other specific person. We are both retired from professions that kept each of us for many years deeply involved with the lives of other people. Our jobs allowed us sometimes to participate with people in their happiest experiences, and we talked about how wonderful it is to be invited to celebrate other people’s joy. We talked also about the times when we had been pulled into other people’s horrific experiences, devastating events that left them and us deeply troubled. My friend had been a priest and I had been a school master: both are professions that require practitioners to make judgements about the behaviors of others, to advise when it is appropriate or necessary, and sometimes to suggest courses of action for people who have done sometimes small and sometimes great wrong to others. We talked about regret and repentance and remorse, about how it is possible to regret without repentance or remorse... how repentance expressed with words but without changes in behavior or attempts at recompense is meaningless.

As I write this, I can’t remember now how or why Ben and I got into such deep talk; but I remembered afterwards what Aldous Huxley said in his foreword to the novel, Brave New World, and I went home and looked it up to be sure I had remembered it correctly.

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

So what does America want from Tiger Wood... and from John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford? After Wood went before the cameras to publicly confess his wrongdoing and to apologize, the debate turned to whether or not he seemed to be sorry. The people in broadcast and print media needed something from him that would keep the story going. They were determined not to allow him off the hook with simple regret or even repentance. They insist that we should want to see remorse, gut-wrenching remorse, remorse that envelopes him and his wife and his children... not a quick flicker of temporary remorse but chronic remorse.

It’s time to leave these people alone, to let them recover, to let them get on with their lives without judgment or interference from me. As the Dalai Lama said, “What is tiger wood?

So I'll get back to looking at DANDELIONS and PELICANS...