I hadn’t – or maybe I had, but hadn’t entirely meant to 146– and, spurred on by the look of disdain on the cashier’s face, I turned to face him in a burst of self-righteousness, unleashing a tirade that went something like this. Even if it had been his turn next, even if I had deliberately cut in front of him, even if his flight was boarding right now as mine was, perhaps he should see where a little compassion got him, because however in the right he no doubt felt he was, you can never know what’s going on in someone else’s head or heart and maybe your behaviour is going to make or break them, or at least their day. Try it, I blazed, just try some compassion and see where it gets you in life.

I should say, at this point, that this was two days after we’d lost you, or lost the baby we thought would be you. A clot of cells far smaller than the weeks we thought you were, no heartbeat, no more than twenty minutes in the operating theatre and home by lunch. But yet.

The businessman shot his cuffs and puffed his chest and smirked. I’m doing pretty well in life, thanks, and I flashed back: I’m talking about your spiritual life, and it was momentarily glorious.

Five minutes later, I thought: Oh.

What if the whole point of my being there, in that queue, on that day, late and flustered and aching with grief, is that it was my chance to show compassion?

Because of course it was, and I failed.

And what if it’s even more than that? What if the whole of my life, everything I’d done and been, the places I’d gone, the people I’d known, had led up to that: this one, petty, 147banal-seeming moment which held within it the possibility of transformation? And instead I gloried in how superior it felt to be so in the right. What if, as I asked myself then and have done almost daily since, what if the people we dislike the most, long-standing nemeses to fleeting antagonists, are those that love us most, that love us so much they have chosen to bear our anger, scorn, contempt? We think the tests will come on the days we’re ready for them, braced and prepared, but they don’t: they come to us unheralded, unexpected, in disguise, the ordinariest of moments.

That’s the first thing I’d tell you.

ii