You know the feeling. Someone does something that gets under your skin — a dismissive comment, a broken promise, a moment of carelessness that lands harder than it should have. And everything in you wants to react. Right now. Before you've thought it through, before you know the full story, before you've given the other person — or yourself — a moment to breathe.
Most of us have been trained to call that impulse passion. The Akan had a different word for it.
They called it the absence of Akoma.
What the symbol actually means
Akoma
Pronounced ah-KOH-mah · Patience · Tolerance · Goodwill · The heart that chooses its response
The Akoma is, on the surface, exactly what it looks like — a heart. One of the most universal symbols in human visual language, appearing across cultures and centuries in roughly the same form. But the Akan meaning runs in a very specific and surprising direction.
In most modern usage, the heart symbol represents romantic love, emotion, feeling. In Akan tradition, Akoma is primarily a symbol of patience and tolerance. Of the capacity to wait. Of goodwill extended even when it isn't immediately deserved.
Nya akoma — have patience. More literally: take heart. Not in the sense of summoning courage, but in the sense of bringing your full, considered, generous self to a situation before you act on it.
Why patience is an act of strength
Here's what the Akan understood that our culture tends to get backwards: patience is not the absence of feeling. It is not suppression, or passivity, or letting things slide. It is the discipline of feeling everything — and choosing your response anyway.
The impatient person is not the passionate one. They are the controlled one. Controlled by whatever just happened, reacting automatically, handing the wheel to whoever or whatever provoked them.
The person with Akoma is the one in possession of themselves.
This is a harder thing to maintain than it sounds, especially when the provocation is real. When the wrong done was genuine. When the patience being asked of you feels like it's protecting someone who doesn't deserve to be protected.
The Akan tradition doesn't dismiss that difficulty. It simply holds that the cost of losing your heart — your considered, patient self — is always higher than the cost of holding it. Because the damage done in unguarded moments tends to outlast the moment itself.
The heart and the people around it
Akoma is also a symbol of the interior life of a community — the warmth that holds people together when circumstances make togetherness difficult. Not the easy affection of good times, but the deliberate goodwill of people who have chosen each other across disagreement, across time, across the ordinary friction of sharing a life or a space or a purpose with other human beings.
This is what makes it different from the Western heart symbol, which tends to be directed outward at a specific person. The Akan Akoma points inward first. It is a quality of character before it is a feeling about someone else.
You cannot give patience you do not have. You cannot extend genuine goodwill from a place of internal contraction. The symbol is a reminder to tend the heart itself — not just to direct it.
What it looks like when it's missing
Look at any relationship that has broken down — personal, professional, communal — and somewhere in the collapse you will almost always find the same thing: a sequence of moments where patience ran out before understanding arrived.
The conversation that escalated before either person had said what they actually meant. The decision made in anger that couldn't be unmade. The assumption acted on before it was checked. The accumulated small moments where someone chose the quick response over the true one, and the distance between people grew a little wider each time.
None of that requires malice. It only requires the absence of Akoma.
Taking heart, literally
The phrase "take heart" appears in English too, but we've mostly lost its force. We use it as encouragement — keep going, it'll be fine. In the Akan sense it is closer to an instruction: before you act, before you speak, before you decide — take your heart. Pick it up. Bring it with you into this moment. Don't leave it behind.
In a culture that rewards speed — of reaction, of response, of certainty — that is quietly countercultural. The person who pauses before they reply. The leader who sleeps on it. The friend who asks one more question before they judge. These are people practising Akoma without necessarily having a name for it.
Now you do.
When did patience cost you something — and turn out to be worth it?
The moment you held back when you wanted to react. The conversation you waited a day to have. The relationship you didn't give up on when it would have been easier to. Akoma tends to show up in hindsight — the moments you're glad you didn't leave your heart behind.
Leave it in the comments. And to explore Akoma alongside the other 95+ Adinkra symbols — each with its own name, origin, and full meaning — visit our Adinkra Symbols Hub.