Whatever you're doing, compassion helps

Where do ideas live? In the 1860s a set of strange ideas drove a certain Mr. Raskolnikov to embark on a morally deteriorating adventure. The author, Dostoevsky, reported that contagious, ‘unfinished’ ideas were ‘floating in the air’, and the protagonist had yielded to them.  This instantly fires up a bunch of questions. Whose were those ideas? Why were they floating? And why on earth had no-one cleaned the air? 

Ideas can be inspiring and dangerous, amusing and alienating. They move from head to head, from individual to individual. But sometimes they lose the leash and become stray. Ideas begin floating, collapsing into each other, mutating. We inhale them. They intoxicate us. 

The airs of our mind are full of stray ideas. Beyond them all, the fifth element, aether, pure, and incorruptible. While humans breath air, gods breathe aether. And when they breathe it, how do they feel? What happens to their lungs and mind? Stuck with the ordinary air of human ideas, we may never find out.

We have another way of musing about the fifth element.

Empedocles once said that everything consists of a combination of fire, earth, air, and water. (Later he jumped into a volcano to prove his immortality.) Hippocrates extended this system to character. From the four bodily fluids derive the four human temperaments, each of which corresponds to a natural element, qualified by heat and wetness:

Pure-substance characters are not inconceivable, though normally we are formed of a mix of those elements. Certain aspects of this model survive even today. Our anger is fiery, our sadness is earthly. One wonders what the fifth element of human character might look like?

We suggest compassion.

As the days rush by, it’s easy to lose ground, to catch vertigo. Progressive ideas are inspiring, pulsating, beating. They inspire us to improve ourselves and the world. Ideas are everywhere, floating about the public squares. Some secretly endorse the status quo. Other cry for radical change, and even revolution.

Whether you’re passing a public square that’s filled with all kinds of ideas, or musing in the quiet spaces of your own home; whether you desire to improve the social order or simply heal some rift with an old friend; whether you seek justice or balance; do not forget the fifth element. Whatever you are doing, do it with love, with compassion.

That should help set right any skewed ideas.