Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

The saying urges a grounding in origins—family, community, and historical inheritance—as a prerequisite for genuine freedom and self-determination. Read in a Baldwinian key, “knowing whence you came” is not nostalgia but clear-eyed recognition of the forces that formed you (race, history, love, injury, and culture). Such knowledge can dissolve internalized limits imposed by society, because it replaces shame or confusion with identity and perspective. The second sentence frames that rootedness as enabling mobility: when you understand your past and the structures around it, you can choose your future more deliberately and resist being defined by others’ narratives.