Bryant Gumbel made me teary.

What's on my mind this morning is redemption.

Ever notice on facebook how half the posts are fierce single-sided rabbles about whatever issue.  Then the other half are fierce other side single-sided rabbles.  They all slur and blur, emotionalism all over the place opionated anger or blather, or opinionated intelligence, or rhetoric, but either way from one single side they stand and pundit and believe themselves to be the only right way and therefor there to be a way that is WRONG.

This started on Sunday for me, which was a classic Sunday of the type I've not had in a while:  reflective to the point of wistfulness, one of those grace days that reflection, rooted in deep contentment, without any reason just showed up and was bigger than me and sort of all I could see.  You know how that goes, suddenly clarity is delivered not with sharpness but softness, so that an eye full of the exact ground you're standing on is delivered unto you, to the point of leaving you literally stirred.  You can't plan or create those experiences.  That's what happened to me Sunday morning, I was behind the snack bar at the big hotel doling out coffee and pre-packaged breakfast sandwiches and mostly, watching TV.

I love HBO and Real Sports is what was on, it compelled me with its stories of course as that is what HBO is so damn good at story-telling. The opening piece was about Victor Conti, he was the steroids guy who sort of really blew the whole issue of performance enhancing drugs wide open some years back and made it permanently a contemporary issue.  He's out of jail now and working with and getting seriously impressive results from a host of young professional athletes.  Of course everyone is questioning the integrity of his approach, of course people are blatantly disdainful of the success of his clients.  After all, there are chemicals and enhancement agents that are entirely undetected, who's to ever say he's not back in the same old dirty game?  And how ultimately to prove he's not?

The next piece was about Tyson, and his pigeons, and the emotional maturity he's undergone since the tragic death of his little girl.  It was sad, and my heart twisted some, even though I remember the disgust I felt watching live the blood clot out from his mouth when he chomped Holyfield's ear; the rage I felt being young just barely finding my girl self when the rape charges were all over the headlines.  And he tells this story about the first time he ever punched someone, he was a kid raising him self in Brownsville and some asshole older kid breaks the neck off one of his pets, an alley pigeon.  And Tyson's like ten or whatever and cracks the guy in the face and is thus redeemed on the streets as a toughie.  No man I wasn't trying to box I was defending myself is what he tells the Real Sports guy, and then within something like a year from that he's been in juvie 38 times yadayada.

And so, what I am thinking about is redemption. 

The core of which, in my own life, has been tolerance.

Allowing others room to be themselves because sometimes your nursery school teacher really was right:  it's just better to be kind than to be right.

Look I'm not excusing biting someone's ear off in the middle of the heavy weight title fight.  I'm not even saying to knock out the asshole who broke the neck of your pigeon-pet, I mean that comes down to what happens in the moment it's presented as anyone who's ever entirely on instinct found themselves suddenly having to physically defend someone they love knows.  And that is it. Who's to judge the decisions we make, particularly in that no one decision ever is separate from the cosmology of motives which daily create who we are?  The cosmology of motives which since the first day of every living breathing one of our lives has been dictating us by one simple means:  we like to feel good, we try to avoid feeling bad.  We, us human species, all have that in common.

Honestly, I dont care what people think is basically what the one young athlete said in response when asked what folks will say when they see he's being trained by Victor Conti.  Paraphrasing, he continues, people who know me will know and trust my decisions, otherwise people are just going to think what they want so why bother worrying.

Here I am all weepy, watching of all things Real Sports, Sunday morning, grateful as hell for the people in my life who have shown me time and again the room I've needed to be human.  What would I have done, where would I be today if I'd stayed on the path that I started somewhere around the age of 14.  I don't know why I was able to make the changes required to re-invent my life but I do know I couldn't have done it without the steady support of friends and family who loved and believed in me.  At times that love even looked like shutting me off or out, in order to force the idea that I had to be the one to take responsibility for myself to change my ways.  But without those same people being willing to give me a second chance I wouldn't be who, or where I am today.  Of that I have no question.

We'd all do better to practice this: tolerance.  Who is so inhuman as to be without fault, who has never hurt another as direct result of their shortcomings?  To be human is to stumble and mess up which is what happens when you live.  It's in fact what makes us so wretchedly alive in this every day walking waking world.  I am thankful for the life I've led, lately wistfully so, that it's taught me enough about me and my humanness to allow others also the chance to be.