Piecing Things Together

Sometimes, like today, I walk through a street fair and its beautiful out. I mean the sky is blue, the air is just warm enough, and you can smell the roasting sweet corn, the shwarma, the incense, and the african shea soap cooking all up and down the street. There are children, and men and women, and every possible combination that could make up a household. There are singular people, couples, groups of teenagers. And one minute you are taking it all in and you can't wipe the smile off your face and the next moment you are filled with this incredible longing. A lust for life it might be called, but your right there in it, being it, so why are you lusting after it? Perhaps then lust for life is not quite the right phrase. What is it about group and community that makes us long to lose ourselves in it? That must be what it is right? I mean look at any grouping, even ones you dont want to belong to, and inevitably they emit this power, this promise of fulfillment that assures all members that they are part of a whole, that for one brief moment they make something other than themselves a tiny bit more complete. Perhaps this is why so many of us are so easily drawn into group mentality and mob thinking- we long for the wholeness we feel from being one of many, we don't feel so alone in the universe. Human beings after all have been said to be innately social creatures. They study monkeys and other mammal groupings and come to this conclusion that we need support systems, we need to belong, and I dont know if this is the truth or if this is what society tells we ought to believe, but it seems to me if society tells us this is how we are supposed to experience things and we are required to be part of society to obtain the things we desire from life, then that distinction is pretty irrelevent. And yet at the same time we are all these seemingly different individuals, whose thoughts and ideas can never fully be identical, and can never be traced back to exactly the same source. So which is it then, are we independent individuals who are not only capable of functioning solo but inevitably must always function solo due to our enormous differences, or are we merely pieces of the whole? Or is it possible that its both? How can we be both part of the group and totally different from the group at the same time?