I was on my phone playing Wordle when it happened.
Which, let’s be honest, is where most of us are for just about everything these days. Distracted. Head down. Scrolling and swiping, half-present, one eye on the screen, the other somewhere less interesting. But at the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, IOC President Kirsty Coventry said something that made me put the phone down and pay attention to the TV playing in the background.
She invoked Ubuntu.
There, on one of the world’s grandest stages with athletes gathered under their flags – the world watching (sort of) – she reminded us all of a philosophy rooted in the soil of Africa that speaks to something far older and broader in scope than any single culture. “I am because we are,” she said, urging that these Olympics be a celebration not just of athletic excellence, but of unity, empathy, and our shared human strength.
I sat with that for a while.
In a modern world that has spent considerable energy reminding itself of everything that divides us, it felt like precisely the message we needed to hear. Not a political message. Not a 30 second hot take meant to go viral. Just a simple, powerful truth. And one that connects to nearly everything The Story of Us Project was built to explore.
So What, Exactly, Is Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is a traditional philosophical principle rooted in Southern African cultures and it expresses something quietly radical: that your identity, your very humanness, does not emerge in isolation. It emerges in relationship to those around you.
The proverb — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — translates literally as:
A person is a person through other people.
Ubuntu isn’t meant to be featured on a Hallmark greeting card. It’s a powerful, complete reorientation of how we understand ourselves. Western philosophy has long elevated the lone individual (think… Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am”). In contrast, Ubuntu replies with something much older and far wiser.
Your personhood is not a fixed, private thing you carry around inside you. It’s something that is continuously shaped by how you engage, serve, and show up for other people.
Desmond Tutu, one of the most luminous modern voices for Ubuntu, described it as more than just a concept. He defined it as a way of life in which human dignity and belonging are inseparable. You can’t fully realize one without the other. Humanity, in the deepest sense, is not a solo quest.
It ‘s shared. It is communal. It is ours, you and me, together.
There Is No Us Without All of Us
When we trace the arc of The Story of Us back from cosmic dawn all the way to the depths of our current consciousness, we aren’t tracing the journey of a single individual. We never were. That arc has always been shared by all of humanity. It has always required the presence of others to become fully itself.
Ubuntu names something ancient, universal, and hiding in plain sight across the world’s great traditions.
Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist who spent his life mapping the structures beneath the surface level “diversity” of human myth, argued that the Hero’s Journey — that ancient story template repeated across cultures and millennia — is never truly a solitary story. The hero may depart alone. But the call to adventure comes from the world. The transformation happens in relationship to others we meet along the way. And the return home brings the gifts back to our community. Even the most solitary seeker ultimately serves the whole.
That pattern echoes Ubuntu at every turn.
And when you start looking for similarities across other cultures, you find them everywhere. Not as borrowed lessons or mere coincidence, but as evidence of something fundamental about what it means to be human.
Have we all been chanting the same fundamental truths this whole time?
In many Indigenous traditions, creation itself is a cooperative act. In Iroquois cosmology, Sky Woman falls from the heavens and the animals work together to build the land on which humanity will live. Mutual identity and survival arise through shared effort, from the very first moment of our genesis.
In Hindu philosophy, the ancient Sanskrit teaching Tat Tvam Asi — Thou art That — expresses the idea that the individual self is not separate from ultimate reality. Beneath apparent difference lies a profound unity. Your essence is woven into the fabric of all existence, and all existence is woven into you.
In Buddhist teaching, the principle of pratītyasamutpāda — interdependent origination — holds that nothing exists independently. Every phenomenon arises because of conditions created by countless others. A flower blooms because of soil, rain, sun, seed, time, and the quiet labor of insects, animals and people we will never see. We humans are no different.
In Christian scripture, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that all of humanity is one body composed of many parts. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Each member belongs to the whole. The metaphor is precise and unsparing: we are incomplete without each another by God’s grand design.
And then there is the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who described standing one afternoon at a busy street corner and being suddenly overwhelmed by love for the strangers around him. The illusion of separateness, he wrote, simply dissolved. He saw that beneath every surface difference lay a shared, luminous identity that no amount of individualism could actually sever.
The myths agree. The sages agree. The mystics agree.
Across continents and centuries, through unique philosophies that never spoke the same language or looked up at the same night sky for answers, humanity keeps arriving at the same understanding:
You do not stand alone. You never have.
Myths from around the world all echo the same fundamental truth. It’s worth repeating:
We are shaped by each other, and the story of one is always entangled with the story of many.
Chris Morehouse Teaches Us This
So, Season 2, Episode 8 of The Story of Us: From Cosmic Dawn to the Depths of Being came along at just the right time for me. In this episode, I share a Saturday morning interview with Chris Morehouse, the author of Legacy: Wisdom of African Traditions and the Bible — a book that places nearly 300 African proverbs alongside biblical scripture.
Chris’ book wasn’t written to flatten the differences between traditions. Nor to simply suggest they are all the same. But to hold them up to the light and ask — do you see what I see? And what you see, again and again, is Ubuntu. Not just the word itself, but the heartbeat behind it. The insistence that we aren’t isolated creatures bumping against one another in the dark. That we are made for and from one another.
What moved me most in our conversation was the quiet, persistent question underneath all of Chris’s work. The question he never quite asks out loud but that hums beneath every page of that book like a tuning fork held against the chest.
Why don’t we know this?
Why have these voices — these centuries of accumulated African wisdom about how to live, how to treat one another, how to find your way when you are lost been left out of the interfaith conversation?
Chris has his suspicions. So do I. And I think if you are honest with yourself, so do you. But here is where I want to leave you — not in the frustration of what has been omitted, but in the quiet wonder of what has been preserved.
Across proverb and parable. Across scripture and song. Across the fire circles of ancient Tanzania and the synagogues of ancient Israel — the same truth kept finding its way to the surface.
You are not alone. You never were. Take care of each other.
That is the oldest story we have. And it belongs to all of us.
If that stirs something in you — I hope you’ll listen to my full conversation with Chris. And I hope you’ll pick up his book. Not because it will give you easy answers, but because it will ask you better questions. The kind that stay with you. The kind that change the way you see a stranger’s face.
That, too, is Ubuntu.
The Medal Was Forged by Many Hands.
The Olympic Games, in their best moments, reflect that same ideal. Athletes from across the globe gather not merely to compete, but to witness each other achieve greatness. Distinctive cultures. Shared arenas and fields of play. Separate languages. But under it all, the thread of a common striving toward human athletic perfection.
Ubuntu gives that spectacle philosophical grounding. It reminds us that even athletic achievement is shared. Every athlete stands behind years of coaching, family support, the achievements of the athletes that came before them, national support and decades of ancestral sacrifice. The medal may hang around one neck, but it was forged by many hands.
And maybe that’s the deeper truth of The Story of Us.
We often narrate life as individual journeys. My goals, dreams and ambitions. My successes and failures. My ultimate enlightenment alone. But the deeper narrative has always included all of us.
We rise by lifting others.
We become by belonging.
We shine because we are connected.
And every culture, in its own native tongue, keeps whispering the same refrain. So, why did we stop listening?
An Invitation to Practice Ubuntu
What would it mean for each of us to actually live this?
Not as a proverb you admire from a comfortable distance or hang on a wall next to your “Live. Laugh. Love” painting, but as a daily practice.
- What if we measured our own success by how much we lifted others along the way?
- What if we understood our identity not as something we protect and defend in isolation, but as something that grows richer and more fully itself the more we give it away in service to others?
Ubuntu doesn’t ask you to dissolve your sense of self. It asks you to understand yourself more completely as a thread in a giant tapestry that has been weaving itself since the first human looked at another human and recognized something of themselves looking back.
Your story is not just yours. It’s woven into the stories of everyone since our creation. In lifting others, something in you rises too.
This isn’t just African wisdom. It isn’t just an Olympic tagline. It isn’t just the teaching of monks and mystics and comparative mythologists.
It’s foundational human wisdom. Ancient, universal, and available to all of us — every ordinary day — if we choose to live inside it.
It is, quite simply, The Story of Us.
What does Ubuntu bring up for you? Where do you see it — or its absence — in your own life? Leave a comment below. The circle is always open.
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