Because I experienced this empathetic moment for the man on the bicycle, I felt the terror of domination and the sheer misery of feeling on the wrong end of that domination, to feel left out of the seeming comforts of conformity it offered, to feel a personal failure, and a deep and abiding self-disgust if not hatred. I knew that feeling, perhaps many of us do to one degree or another. In that way, I did establish the I/Thou with that tortured man. I didn't want to live within his suffering, and I felt compassion for the fact that he made that choice. That's the very moment that I knew and experienced the truth about others' actions toward me. It's almost Newtonian. For every ugly and aggressive action an actor commits toward another, the actor undergoes a dis-equal and disproportionate ugly and aggressive set of feelings within. Experiencing and knowing that piece of truth has made the idea of compassion feel quite natural and inevitable. Compassion comes and the rest of that wonderful triad plus one appear: compassion, unconditional positive regard, forgiveness, plus acceptance.
That helped my anger exponentially. I found it liberating and transformative. The more I felt these positive and generative emotions toward others, the more I could feel that way about myself, not something to which I was overly accustomed. In some way, ultimately all that didn't quite satisfy the need of the situation. I felt positive qualities, but I did nothing discernable with them. Sometime after that, I read C. S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. In that book he asserts that an essential thing we can do for ourselves and others best manifests itself in wishing good. That act of wishing good can happen in spite of everything. Thinking about it now, wishing good can and maybe definably must happen in an unconditional way. Maybe it just happens unconditionally because that's just the way it happens. Wishing someone good in an angry way simply doesn't work. If it's not unconditional, it's not the good that Lewis means.
If we need an action to perform at a time of stress, as a response to a moment that can instigate a choice for anger, we can choose to sincerely wish the other person good. I find it especially helpful when other drivers seem to attack me personally in the way they drive. When I wish that driver good, I actually do something in response to the very unpleasant experience the other driver affords me. In moments where we seem to inspire negative feelings about ourselves, we can wish ourselves good. When I make that wish for self-good, I find that I learn better from whatever the error I chose and enacted that might have stimulated self-anger.
Wishing good does me good. Anger doesn't. Good calls me to my becoming self which, in its essential operation, seeks good as a primary end in itself even as finding the good begins even more search for the good. My wishing of good enters into and reengages my becoming self in the quest of aspiration toward an ever increasing universal good. Anger calls me to somewhere entirely else. When we engage in wishing and even enacting good, it calls us quite naturally to the unconditional, the compassionate, the forgiving, and the accepting of all the worlds of Thou which surround us every day.