It’s easy to be angry. It’s easy to get riled up and mutter or to make rude gestures and swear. It isn’t so easy to be forgiving. And I’m not talking about turning the other cheek here or any of that stuff. I’m talking about seeing it from the other person’s point of view. And being forgiving.

I had an incident recently on holiday which basically involved a very wet cyclist mouthing off because he decided someone (no, it wasn’t me) had driven too close to him and nearly forced him into a ditch. He was loud, rude, aggressive, out of order and foul-mouthed. I tried to speak to him reasonably on behalf of the person he was being abusive to and he gave me a mouthful as well. Then he rode off and shook his fist at me which made his bicycle wobble and inside I laughed, a lot. I found it easy to forgive him not in any religious sense but because I could see he had chosen the wrong holiday.

He had obviously been persuaded that the cycling holiday would be fun but it was in hilly, really hilly, countryside, and it had rained all that day. He was tired, wet, aching and very unhappy. How could I not forgive him? If I had foolishly chosen that holiday, I too would have been grumpy, ready for a fight, fed up, tetchy and raw. I felt quite sorry for him and could sense a great deal of his unhappiness. Yes, he was in the wrong to use such foul language – especially in front of children. Yes, he was ready for a fight and intimidating and aggressive. But he was also me or you or anyone else in that situation, cold, wet, miserable. And who is to say we wouldn’t have lost our temper if we too had chosen the wrong holiday?

Being forgiving doesn’t mean we have to be pushed around or put up with nonsense. We can stand our ground and say, ‘Sorry I don’t need to take that’, but we can also make an attempt to forgive because we can see it from the other person’s point of view. Maybe the word is tolerant rather than forgiving. But either way we don’t have to mistake forgiveness or tolerance or whatever with meekness. We can still be saying, ‘Shove off with your bad language and sad bicycle and your mother smells of hamsters’, while feeling sorry for the poor idiot at the same time. He was a good man who did a naughty thing.

Just bear in mind that anyone you come into contact with who hacks you off may have had a really bad time before they got to you.