The Walls We Inherit, The Bridges We Remember

This morning, in the warmth of a circle I’ve created — a space for open hearts and honest voices — a dear friend shared something that stayed with me. They spoke of a study suggesting that Boomers are passing over Gen X for leadership roles, choosing to promote Millennials instead.

I don’t know if it’s true, and in that moment, it didn’t matter. What caught me was not the statistic, but the quiet ache beneath it — the way we, as humans, keep finding new lines to draw between us.

We’ve been at this a long time. Once it was man and woman. Then skin colour. Then borders. Then religion. Now it’s generations. We create labels to describe differences, and then those labels harden into walls we live inside of.

Some walls are easy to see — laws, borders, rules. But the most dangerous ones are invisible. The ones we’ve built in our minds, stacked stone by stone out of assumptions, old stories, and half-heard truths. The ones that turn a living, breathing person into a category, an outline we’ve already decided how to fill in.

Some will say this is just human nature. And they’re not entirely wrong.

I’ve seen it in my own life. Years ago, I worked in a team where we were divided — not by hostility, but by habit. The younger members huddled together in one corner of the lunchroom, trading the latest trends and jokes. The older members sat at another table, swapping stories of “how we used to do it.” We liked each other well enough, but in all the months we worked together, no one thought to cross the room. One day, a project forced us into collaboration, and what unfolded was magic — experience met fresh perspective, patience met urgency, and together we created something none of us could have done alone.

But outside that rare project, the habit returned. Invisible walls are resilient.

Our ancestors survived by knowing who was kin and who wasn’t. Our nervous systems evolved to sort the world into “safe” and “unsafe” with incredible speed. But somewhere in the turning of history, the tool became the master. We started worshipping the walls themselves.

Fear makes the walls higher. Scarcity makes them thicker. And the speed of modern life doesn’t leave us the time to stop and ask if they should be there at all.

Add to that the way our systems are built — attention economies thrive on outrage, not understanding. Outrage is fast, easy, and sticky. Nuance is slow, difficult, and doesn’t trend. We’ve been trained to react before we’ve truly seen.

But there’s something deeper here, love. Something older than the habit of division.

We are not separate. Not as a nice metaphor — but as reality. The same water that runs through my veins will run through yours. The same breath that leaves my lungs can enter your body in the next moment. The same earth holds us both.

Our differences are the colours of the quilt, not the reason to tear the fabric.

There are traditions that still remember this. The language of I&I in Rastafari — the understanding that there is no “me” and “you” in opposition, only the One seeing through many eyes. Ubuntu from southern Africa — I am because we are. The Akan wisdom of Sankofa — to go back and fetch what we left behind, not out of nostalgia but to restore what’s needed for the journey ahead.

This remembering is not sentimental. It is survival of another kind.

The cost of forgetting is everywhere. It’s in politics, yes, and in the workplace. But it’s also in the small and quiet places.

It’s in the neighbour we never greet because we’ve decided they’re “not our kind.”

It’s in the colleague whose ideas we dismiss without hearing because they don’t “think like us.”

It’s in the old friend we slowly drift from because life pulled us into different circles, and we didn’t know how to cross back over.

It’s in the way loneliness has become normal — how we adapt to isolation the way eyes adapt to darkness, forgetting what it’s like to see in the light.

And the cost isn’t just emotional. Division shrinks our capacity to create. It corrodes trust. It distorts power — because it’s easier to control fragments than a chorus.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the bridge and the wall are made of the same material. Attention.

Where we place our attention grows. Feed the story of separation, and the wall rises higher. Feed the story of kinship, and the wall begins to crumble, stone by stone.

So the work is simple — not easy, but simple.

We slow down enough to see.

We ask one question before we make one point.

We practice repair when harm has been done, even if it wasn’t intended.

We create spaces where generations, cultures, and perspectives sit at the same table and stay long enough to be changed by one another.

I remember in my twenties being part of something we called The Agents Club. It was me and three other moms — one in her thirties, one in her forties, and one in her fifties. We would gather in each other’s kitchens or living rooms, coffee or tea in hand, children playing somewhere in the background, and we would talk.

Not the small talk that passes time — but the conversations that shape it. They told me stories about raising teenagers, navigating marriage, surviving loss, and finding themselves again after seasons of giving everything to everyone else. I listened, soaking in their laughter and their lessons, their honesty and their hard-won wisdom.

Those afternoons were a kind of apprenticeship I didn’t even know I was in. They handed me tools I wouldn’t use for years — but when the moments came, I found I already knew how to hold them. That club was proof that when generations sit together without agenda, something ancient and life-giving flows between us. The walls dissolve, and all that’s left is the weaving.

Which brings me back to my friend’s words in our circle this morning. Whether that study is accurate or not matters less than what we do with it.

If we let it, it becomes another stone in the wall. Another reason to mutter “they always” or “we never.” Another category to guard ourselves against.

But if we choose differently, it can become a seed in the garden. An invitation to ask:

• How do we design systems where wisdom flows both ways?

• How do we make sure experience isn’t hoarded and new thinking isn’t dismissed?

• How do we become the kind of people for whom difference is nourishment?

We are not asked to agree on everything. We are asked to remember that we are everything — many faces of one Life, learning to speak to itself again.

Let’s become difficult to divide.

Let’s practice the slow, stubborn art of seeing each other clearly.

I&I, always — meeting I&I.