Hi,
I'm Mark.
And today I want to talk about an idea I first came across while traveling in South Africa,
An idea that challenges something most of us have been taught to believe about who we are.
That we are,
First and foremost,
Individuals.
It's called Ubuntu and it often is summarized in a single phrase,
I am because we are.
Now that can sound like a nice sentiment,
The kind of thing that gets printed on a poster and totally forgotten.
But I want to actually unpack what it's saying because I think it's a genuinely different way of understanding a human being,
Not just a nice idea about kindness.
Most of us,
Especially in the West,
Have grown up with a very particular starting point.
I exist as a separate,
Complete individual and then afterwards I choose to form relationships with other people.
The self comes first,
The community comes second,
Almost as an accessory.
Ubuntu reverses that order entirely.
It says a person becomes a person through other people.
Your humanity isn't something you arrive with fully formed in isolation.
It's something that's shaped continually by your connections,
Your community,
Your responsibilities to the people around you.
Not,
I think,
Therefore I am.
Something closer to,
We are,
Therefore I am.
There's a story often told about this involving an anthropologist who once offered a group of children in an African village a race for a basket of sweets placed some distance away with the winner taking the lot.
Instead of racing individually,
The children joined hands and they ran together and then shared the sweets equally.
Now when asked why,
Given that one of them could have won everything,
The response was simple.
How could one of us be happy if all the rest were sad?
Now,
Whether that particular story is exact history or has been retold and shaped over the years,
It captures something real about how Ubuntu actually functions.
Success isn't measured only by what you individually have achieved.
It's measured by what happens to the people around you while you achieved it.
I think this matters enormously right now because so much of modern life quietly pulls us the opposite direction.
We're encouraged to optimize our own lives,
Our own goals,
Our own happiness,
Often as though other people are either obstacles to that or,
At best,
Spectators to it.
Ubuntu suggests that framing is not just unkind,
It's factually wrong about what a person actually is.
You did not make yourself.
You were fed by other people before you could feed yourself,
Taught language by people who spoke to you before you could speak.
Held physically by other people before you could hold yourself up.
The self on its own is something of a fiction.
There's a practical everyday version of this too.
Ubuntu shows up in something as simple as how disputes get resolved in many African communities,
Often through communal conversation and consensus,
Rather than one person simply being declared right and the other wrong.
The goal isn't to win,
It's to restore the relationship because the relationship is understood to matter more than any individual argument inside it.
So here's something to try right now.
Think of one relationship in your life.
At work,
At home,
Anywhere,
Where you've slipped into thinking mostly about your own side of it.
Like what you need.
What you're owed.
What you're not getting.
Now ask a different question.
What would it mean in this relationship for me to become more myself through them rather than in spite of them?
Not a demand to sacrifice yourself for other people,
That isn't what this is,
Simply a recognition that you were never actually separate from them to begin with.
That is the whole practice,
Not becoming less of an individual,
Remembering that your individuality was built and is still being built by the people around you every single day.
So see if you can try and use this in your everyday life.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
With love.
