If you had to wait for everybody to be good before you’d treat them well, we’d all be at each other’s throats pretty quickly. Goodness has to start here. And you have to decide it’s going to start with you. If you can have this attitude, it cleanses the mind.

"Ill will you wash away with goodwill [mettā]. Stop to think when you’re wishing goodwill for someone: What are you wishing? You’re wishing that they understand the cause for true happiness and they act on them to the point where they get results. Is there anyone out there for whom you cannot feel that?

You might be able to think of a few people. You’d like to see them squirm a little bit before they finally get on the path to true happiness, after all the evil they’ve done. But the Buddha didn’t condone that attitude. There was the case of Angulimala, who’d killed hundreds of people. The Buddha had compassion for him, was able to teach him the Dhamma, and Angulimala was able to escape a lot of the bad karma that would have come to him if he’d continued his ways.

A lot of people, however, were not happy for him. They wanted to see him suffer first. They would throw things at him when he was on his almsround. But you want to ask yourself, “Do you want to be the type of person who throws things at an arahant?” If not, try to develop goodwill even for people who’ve been really evil. May they change their ways.

So stop and think if there’s anybody out there who for whom you cannot feel goodwill. It’d be good to cleanse your mind of that attitude right now. Take yourself patiently step by step by step to the point you can say, “I hope this person would understand the causes for true happiness and act on them.”

When you can think in that way, you become a more trustworthy person. There’s no sense that you have to get back at somebody or settle a few scores. When you have this attitude, then you can trust that no matter who you deal with, you will deal with in a skillful way. This is what you want to be able to trust: that you’ll act skillfully regardless of the circumstances.

You have to maintain your sense of honor. You might say, “Well, because so-and-so did something bad, that gives me the right to do something bad in return.” But that kind of attitude is what tears the world apart.

The attitude that can have goodwill even for people who are doing evil, so that when you’re dealing with them you can trust yourself: That’s what keeps the goodness in the world going.

If you had to wait for everybody to be good before you’d treat them well, we’d all be at each other’s throats pretty quickly. Goodness has to start here. And you have to decide it’s going to start with you. If you can have this attitude, it cleanses the mind."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Cleansing the Mind"