It's easy to do the right thing, when the right thing is easy to do.

I had lunch with my brother last week. He and I are definitely related. Not only do we look alike, but we have many of the same mannerisms, we struggle with many of the same issues, and of course we share the same history. Our relationship has always been intense. I’ve always said there is no one on this earth who can, in an instant, make me laugh harder or hurt me more intensely than my brother. We know each other more than I think we like to admit.

There have been whole years where we have gone without speaking to one another. We share the same quick temper and when those tempers flared, angry words were exchanged, lines in the sand were drawn, and in the after math, it was just easier to let the days pass than to make amends.

There have been many more good times than bad, however. We’ve spent hours and hours in intense conversation, discussing and analyzing our most important relationships and trying to make sense of the often strange dynamic that exists within our family. And there have been many more hours spent exchanging new music, sharing book and movie recommendations, trying out new restaurants, and going to concerts together. For most of our lives, we’ve been a team.

Of all the things I love about my brother, one of the things I admire most is his emotional complexity. His inner life is rich and complex and often complicated, and that’s not something he shies away from. One thing we share in common is that we both live with a voice in our heads that questions or criticizes nearly every thing we do. It’s exhausting, but because we have each lived with it for so long, it feels natural. One of the by- products of living with this voice is a propensity to worry. We are masters when it comes to stewing about things. And when it comes to an anxious stomach or a sleepless night – we’ve got it nailed.

So when my brother told me over lunch last week that he’d been unable to sleep for the last several days, I instantly related.

“What’s going on?” I asked. My brother began relaying his story.

Several days earlier, he had returned from lunch to his office and decided to park on the street rather than in the employee parking lot. He’d found a tight spot and carefully eased his car into it. As he returned later that afternoon, he noticed a parking control cop with lights flashing near where his car was parked. As he neared, he realized the officer was parked right next to his car and appeared to be inspecting his rear bumper. A woman he vaguely recognized as a fellow employee hovered nearby.

“This your car?” the officer inquired of my brother.

“Yes.”

“You park it?” he went on.

“Yes, why?”

“Well, it seems you banged up the car behind you pretty good trying to squeeze into that spot. You remember hittin’ the car behind you while you was parkin’?”

“No,” my brother answered, becoming alarmed.

“Well your paint‘s all over this lady’s bumper, and as you can see, you crunched her up pretty good.”

As it turns out, my brother had just touched up the paint on his rear bumper the night before, and sure enough, the fresh paint was on the front bumper of the car behind him. He knew he had tapped her as he’d edged into the spot. In fact he’d backed up until he felt his bumper touch hers before he started pulling forward again. But he knew for certain he hadn’t “crunched” anything.

He looked hard at the car behind him, and then more closely at the lady hovering nearby and quickly realized this was not headed in a good direction. The car in question had clearly been in an accident, but not one he had caused. He suspected the driver was looking for someone with insurance to pay for an earlier fender bender.

Now here is an interesting thing about that voice that lives in our heads. It can be our own worst enemy, taunting and nagging us till we want to throw our selves in front of a moving bus just to get it to shut up. But let someone else criticize us, or even hint at the suggestion that we’re wrong, and that voice jumps to our defense with the power of a ninja.

“What? You’re not going to let them get away with that are you? Do you see what that woman is trying to do? She is trying to nail you! You are being screwed, my friend. S-C-R-E-W-E-D!”

Thankfully, we’ve both learned not to listen to everything the voice suggests, but sometimes it’s just easier than others to ignore. This, it turned out, was not one of the easy times.

My brother got angry. He got defensive. He lost his cool. And before he knew what hit him, he was sporting not one, but two tickets – one for hitting a parked car and the other for parking more than 12 inches from the curb. And he had his very own date with a judge to chat about it further.

My brother was furious. He was angry at the owner of the car, he was angry at the cop, and he was angry with himself. For the next several days he stewed about it, playing the interaction over and over in his mind. He thought about what he could have said and done differently. He thought about how badly he’d been wronged. And in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep because his mind was racing, he thought of revenge.

He knew his anger was wasted energy. He knew he was only torturing himself. Yet he couldn’t seem to let it go.

The day before our lunch, my brother saw the woman’s car parked on the street. Although he’d been looking for it, this was the first time he’d seen it. His fury rose. There was no one in sight. It was a perfect opportunity for revenge. He imagined the deep gash his key would make across her door. His heart raced. He pictured her frustration when she returned to her car to find all four tires flat. His palms began to sweat. He imagined the satisfaction he would feel at knowing he had been vindicated.

And then, in a moment that he described as feeling “other worldly”, he reached into his pocket, dug out some change and began feeding her parking meter. He emptied his pockets, and then went back to his car to get more. He fed the meter with every bit of change he could find, filling it beyond its limit.

My eyes brimmed with tears as I listened.

“I couldn’t imagine how that could help,” he told me. “I only knew I didn’t want to continue feeling the way I’d been feeling. I did it with faith that an act of generosity would be more powerful than an act of revenge. But in the moment, I really, truly, couldn’t believe it was anything other than ridiculous.”

I asked him how he felt now, 24 hours after having fed her meter. “I feel better,” he said. “I slept last night.”

This very rarely happens to me, but I was at a loss for words.

It’s easy to do the right thing when the right thing is easy to do. It’s much harder when you are feeling hurt and angry and your mind is itching for revenge. And it is nearly impossible when your faith feels empty because you can’t even imagine, let alone believe, that your actions could make a difference.

I believe my brother to be a giant of a person. And I couldn’t love him more.