They didn't know what they were doing

Look back at the week. The break-room resentment. The payback you canceled. The nightly tab you stopped letting compound. The flaw you stopped being surprised by. The brother or old friend you finally messaged. Underneath all of it sits one idea, and it's the one to carry forward.

Marcus, in a long passage on what to do when someone has wronged you, gives nine reasons to let it go, and the heaviest is the plainest: when people do wrong, "it is plain that they do so involuntarily and in ignorance." A few lines on, the other side of it: "man's life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead" (Meditations 12.26, Long). Almost no one who hurt you woke up choosing to be cruel to you specifically. They were working from a worse picture than you had — bad information, old fear, their own un-examined grudge. They erred the way the ignorant always err: without seeing.

That doesn't make the wrong fine. It makes the hatred unnecessary. You can hold someone to account and still drop the venom, because the venom was always for a villain who mostly doesn't exist.

Next week turns to being the good colleague — the daily, ordinary justice of how you treat people. It goes easier once your hands aren't full of old grudges.