I wonder if you’ve heard this story and what you thought about it? This is the way I heard it:

An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African village. He put a basket of fruit near a tree and told the children that whoever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run, they took each other’s hands and ran together, then sat together, enjoying their treats.

When the anthropologist asked them why they had run in that way, since one could have had all the fruits for himself, they said: “Ubuntu! How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?”

In the Xhosa culture, the word Ubuntu means: “I am because we are.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains that Ubuntu is “the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness … We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.”

With a sense of belonging and connection at the heart of our understanding, it would be unthinkable to compete for personal gain or to harm others without realizing the harm to oneself.

Is our interconnectedness a reality or just a nice idea?

Long before scientific understanding gave us clear answers to that question, we seem to have intuited the truth of it. We can hear it from sources throughout written history. From Chief Seattle: “This we know: All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

Or from Democritus in ancient Greece: “The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.”

In the present day our scientific learning is proving what our intuitions have long known. Joanna Macy, a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology, in her book “Coming Back to Life,” tells us: “Today we are learning from living systems theory that “every system is a ‘holon.’ That is, it is both a whole in its own right, comprised of subsystems and, simultaneously, an integral part of a larger system. These holons form ‘nested hierarchies,’ systems within systems, circuits within circuits, fields within fields. Each new holonic level – say from atom to molecule, cell to organ, person to family — generates emergent properties that are non-reducible to the capacities of the separate components. Far different than the hierarchies of control familiar to societies where rule is imposed from above, in nested hierarchies….order tends to arise from the bottom up; the system self-generates from spontaneously adaptive cooperation between the parts, in mutual benefit.”

So as we come to understand and embrace the ideas embodied in Ubuntu, would anything change? If we grow to actually feel our connection with other people, with all that lives and breathes, with the rocks and matter that make up the known universe (I have heard it said that we are made up of the same elements that make up stars and salt water) then a thousand million things would change. All our perceptions and understandings would be reshaped.

It’s fun to imagine some of what would be different. What would be some of your favorites?

Here are a few of mine. I think we would come to be less easily led by fear of each other and by institutions that urge us to war with each other. We would have compassion for those who try to use us in those ways and there would be help for them. The good old golden rule would have real meaning in our lives, well beyond the kindergarten years. We could leave nationalism behind as a relic of Newtonian physics, which fit neatly with the industrial revolution but which is leaving us now at a junction of crises created by that set of scientific understandings.

This is a lot of words but only the tiniest start to an important discussion. Taking hands and running together for the prize is becoming more and more urgent. Let’s keep talking.

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Rosalie Paul is a member of PeaceWorks and lives in Topsham.