The Debt We Were Never Meant to Repay

A remembering, not a reckoning

There is a debt we carry that asks for nothing in return.

No interest. No ledger. No repayment plan.

Only remembrance.

It is the quiet debt of gratitude owed to the knowledge and wisdom that shaped us long before we could name ourselves as thinkers, teachers, or creators. A debt not of obligation, but of lineage. Of relationship. Of reverence.

None of us arrive at our ideas alone.

We arrive already inhabited—by voices we cannot fully trace, by gestures and stories that found us before we knew how to listen. Our thinking is never solitary. It is a weaving. A convergence. A long conversation moving through time and space.

We are—always—giants standing on the shoulders of giants.

And those giants were standing on others still.

Growth Is Not Self-Made

Growth is not something we manufacture from within.

It is not proof of independence or exceptionalism.

Growth happens because we are porous.

Because something outside us touches something inside us and changes its shape.

Every insight we claim has passed through countless lives before it reaches our own: ancient philosophers and unnamed elders; professors and mentors; strangers in bars who spoke a sentence that lodged itself quietly and resurfaced years later. Our children, who dismantle our certainty without effort. Books we half-remember. Teachings we absorbed before we understood their weight.

What we call our thinking is, in truth, an integration.

Original thought is not born from isolation.

It is born from relationship.

The Ancestry We Cannot Fully Name

Here is where humility becomes unavoidable.

Given how little we truly know about the roots of the knowledge we carry—how could any of us claim ownership with certainty?

If we trace far enough back, the threads of what we now call philosophy, psychology, leadership, healing, and meaning-making lead us again and again to ancient civilizations, to Indigenous peoples, to African elders, to oral traditions that were never meant to be written down, fenced in, or extracted from land and kin.

Much of what modern institutions teach as theory once lived as wisdom-in-practice: held in bodies, transmitted through story, embedded in ritual, guarded by elders whose names history did not record.

So much of this knowledge survived conquest, erasure, and renaming. It survived because it was communal. Because it belonged to no one—and therefore could not be destroyed by the loss of one.

When we speak honestly, we must admit:

we do not fully know who taught us.

we cannot list all our teachers.

many of them were never credited.

many of them were silenced.

The most truthful stance, then, is not certainty—but reverence.

Remembering Without Knowing the Name

Only recently did I learn of Adinkra—a visual language of wisdom carried by the Akan peoples of present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire—symbols used for centuries to transmit philosophy, ethics, cosmology, and guidance without writing.

And yet, nothing here feels foreign.

This is the strange and beautiful truth:

we often live inside wisdom long before we learn its lineage.

Adinkra symbols were never decoration. They were condensed teachings—ways of holding knowledge in community when writing was unsafe, inaccessible, or unnecessary. They carried memory when memory itself was under threat.

Which means this wisdom did not survive because it was owned.

It survived because it was shared.

Sankofa — Remembering as Movement

One symbol stops me in my tracks: Sankofa. Often shown as a bird moving forward while turning its head back.

Its teaching is simple and immense: go back and get it.

There is no growth without remembrance. No future without retrieval.

We do not advance by discarding what came before us—we advance by returning to it with reverence and discernment. Sankofa names what this entire inquiry is circling: learning is not accumulation; it is return.

I’ve explored this teaching of Sankofa more deeply elsewhere. That reflection lives here: Sankofa: The Power of Turning Back to Remember.

Dwennimmen — Strength With Humility

Another symbol, Dwennimmen—the ram’s horns—teaches that true strength is inseparable from humility.

Wisdom does not dominate.

It does not declare ownership.

It does not need to prove itself.

This symbol quietly dissolves the myth of the lone expert, the authoritative thinker, the isolated originator. Knowledge was never meant to elevate one above others—it was meant to shape character and restore right relationship.

Nkyinkyim — Wisdom Must Be Able to Turn

Nkyinkyim, the symbol of twisting and transformation, reminds us that wisdom is not static. It changes shape as it moves through time, people, and place.

This is what happens when knowledge remains alive.

It adapts. It responds. It evolves.

What we call “our ideas” are often wisdom that has turned—met new contexts, new questions, new lives—and continued on. These are but a few of the many symbols in this beautiful wisdom tradition.

The Tension We Rarely Speak Aloud

There is a quiet tension here, and it deserves to be named—not with judgment, not with shame, but with clarity.

We live in a world that insists knowledge can be owned. That ideas can be enclosed, branded, priced, and protected as property. That wisdom can be separated from its lineage and sold back to the world as product.

This framing did not arise by accident. It emerged alongside systems that privileged extraction over relationship, enclosure over commons, authorship over ancestry—systems that learned how to lift knowledge out of living cultures, strip it of ceremony and context, and reintroduce it as neutral, marketable content.

When this happens, wisdom subtly changes orientation.

It stops asking: How does this serve life?

And begins asking: Who can afford access?

This is not an argument against exchange. Exchange has always existed. But historically, exchange was relational—rooted in reciprocity, obligation, and care.

What we see now is often different.

Knowledge is priced without remembrance.

Sold without lineage.

Separated from the people and lands that carried it through danger.

And when that happens, growth itself becomes stratified.

Some people get mirrors.

Some get language for their pain.

Others are left without words for what they are living.

This Is Not About Ethics

It Is About Honour

This is not a moral indictment.

It is not a call to purity or self-erasure.

It is a call to honour.

To remember where we are standing.

To recognize that wisdom was never meant to elevate individuals above others, but to return communities to right relationship—with each other, with land, with life itself.

To honour knowledge is not to deny creativity or contribution. We do create. We synthesize. We translate wisdom into forms that meet the moment we are living in.

But honesty asks us to situate that contribution truthfully.

To say:

I did not come from nothing.

I am not self-made.

I am shaped by many voices—some named, many not.

Honour is a posture of listening backward—of feeling the weight of what survived so that we could arrive here.

This is not shame.

It is belonging.

Stewardship, Not Ownership

In this light, authorship becomes something different.

Not ownership—but stewardship.

We do not own wisdom.

We carry it—for a time.

We tend it.

We shape it with care.

We pass it forward as best we can.

Every framework is provisional.

Every theory is incomplete.

Every “original” idea is an integration still unfolding.

To teach, to write, to share—especially to charge—without betraying the stream we drink from requires remembrance.

It requires naming influence generously.

Holding ideas gently.

Leaving doors open where others would build gates.

It requires restraint.

And perhaps most of all, it requires gratitude.

A Living Acknowledgement

I owe a debt I cannot repay.

To ancient philosophers and African elders.

To Indigenous wisdom keepers whose names were never written.

To university professors and strangers in bars.

To Landmark, to NLP, to so many movements and modalities that cracked something open.

To my children, who continue to teach me what matters.

I do not know all their names.

I never will.

So I choose remembrance over ownership.

Gratitude over certainty.

Stewardship over possession.

Not because it is ethical.

But because it is true.

And because wisdom—like life itself—was never meant to belong to any one of us.

It was meant to move through us.

To shape us.

And to be carried forward,

with care.