Ubuntu

I didn't make the point I wanted to make with yesterday's text, so I'm trying again. What I learned from Ntate Sam, and what was reinforced for me throughout the six years I lived in southern Africa, is the meaning of ubuntu. It translates as, "I am a person because I am one of the people," but that just serves to stupefy most people reared to compete and succeed in a capitalist system.

What Ntate Sam said, and what he lived by, is the belief that troubles (Buddhists might say suffering) visit everybody; there is no family on earth that hasn't known death, illness, aging, accidents, hurt, insult, and loss; and that one thing we can do with our troubles is use them to connect with others. As Ntate Sam put it, "No one doesn't know trouble." That doesn't mean we welcome trouble. That would be stupid. But it means that when trouble comes--and it will come--we can choose to let it burnish us, polish and weather us, so that we understand others who are having trouble. Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Kindness," is also about that.

So ubuntu means that I'm not all that "special" and "unique." It means that like every other person on earth, good things and bad things come to me. Love. Loss. Ecstasy. Passion. Death. I have emotions about those things; and that makes me just like you. In fact, that's how I know what a human being is: I know I'm a human because stuff happens to me that happens to other humans.

The picture sort of dimly relates to what I wanted to say. But mainly, I wanted to say this. Thanks, Ntate Sam, for showing me what ubuntu means. "Connection" is the buzzword for it in our culture right now. It goes by many names.