The whole world is elated when space flights take place. All the people who witnessed it on TV or heard on the radio or even read in the newspapers felt in some way, a part of the journey of the recent two-person flight to the international space station while our feet were firmly on the ground. Bringing a dog into the houses of us humans brings about a joy that we cannot explain as we start sharing our lives with an animal. A friend of mine who is an audiophile has essentially figured out a way to incorporate within himself the joy of the music creators who he will never meet in person and melts into the musical notes and flies in their midst. Try gardening and the first bloom adds nectar to the persons tending to the garden. A photograph of a rose fills us up with a heavenly scent. Adding friends into our lives makes our life much bigger than our own individual lives. Perhaps we are not meant to be an individual. We are a tiny part of a collective of all that is around us. The more we strive to be individual, we will deny ourselves the joy of being a part of the collection including all life forms whether they be plants or animals, and even the inanimate world in which we live. Who can deny the peace and joy of being on a forest trail or even observing a mountain as we are driving through it if we allow ourselves to become a part of the world in which we exist? A lot of us try or even fight to be individual rather than a part of something bigger. We are fighting the collective and the world that we are a part of and then wonder why this brings about so much grief. We are all doing zoom meetings nowadays. Some meetings leave us elated and others leave us wanting. The happy meetings are those where all the participants are wanting to belong to the collective of all the participants. The zoom meetings which leave us tired are the ones where one or more participant is fighting to stand out as an individual rather than folding into the communal collective delight. Our lives are not meant to be our own but a part of the contemporaneous universe in which we live. Why fight for our singularity when we are part of a plurality? Why not indulge ourselves in the serene joy of the plurality to which we all belong…..