When Going Backwards Takes Us Forward

By David Mugun|Author|Management & training Consultant|Publisher|

Once upon a time, lived a man of meagre resources. He had nowhere else to live in save for an exhausted and abandoned diamond mine. The miners had long moved out to a new site to prospect for more diamonds. The poor chap made a home out of the tunnels in the old mine. One day, as the sun's rays shone through the shaft, he saw a rainbow cast against the wall. The source of the rays was a shiny stone on this wall. With his mattock, the man delivered a few blows on the wall. It chipped away around the shiny stone and alas! A huge clean crystal fell to the ground. He immediately recognised that it was a perfect diamond crystal. He then went about his dealings quietly and this paid off handsomely as it fetched him a fortune. From then on, he became a man of means. Therefore, there are times when we must return to our abandoned past to chip away at specific surroundings in order to retrieve the secret fortunes that were left behind. It is about us going backwards beneficially whilst spring cleaning out what we no longer need moving forward. Let's begin with schooling. In traditional setups, children were taught at home by their parents. Oral traditions, house chores and field routines such as cattle herding were inculcated over time. Today, homeschooling is gaining currency and so is online learning, both happening at home where it all began. If this trend is sustained, then baby class beginners will not undergo the traumatic experience of being left in school on day one. The crying, the shock of being left with strangers and the forced adjustment to a new environment, at a time when the child is too young for that kind of life, will be a thing of the bad past unless your child is destined for military service. Of cause, time must be set aside for playtime because children must be allowed to develop social skills through fun activities. Before we got present-day technologies to facilitate the Work-From-Home - WFH concept, we had to be taken to an institution with its own norms and time tables. In fact, the homegrown culture had suffered immensely because, parents sent their children to institutions to get them ready for greater opportunities ahead but today, most curriculums are as obsolete as the dinosaur and children now return with undesirable knowledge and traits. We are preparing children for a world that will no longer exist when they come of age. William Shakespeare, no doubt was a great literature guru but our children need to learn about what will work in the next 10 or more years to come. We cannot have too many things from the past.  So as we go backwards to strengthen the home culture as the pivot for schooling and working, courtesy of technological advancements, let us drop the costly institutional brick and mortar approaches so that home is the only brick and mortar setup that works. That is what the car did to horses. Next is nutrition. For far too long, families that consider themselves modern, have literally purchased every food item that they consume. It is not practical to grow everything but added to the WFH concept, we now have time with our kids and as we know it, there is a time for everything under the sun.  Now is the time to set gardening objectives for everyone. Make it a fun time and grow all your vegetables from your gardens and balconies. After all, it is better to eat homegrown kale than to eat very leafy sewer-grown ones that are easy on the eye but bad for our health. This will be a health risk management mechanism. So going back to good old times gardening is a good way to pass down healthy practices and lifestyles to our young people. We are officially in the Do-It-Yourself - DIY age. Gardening will go hand in hand with other repair jobs at home. Nationally, its time to get the country back to local foods such as sweet potatoes, cassava, millet, sorghum, and indigenous vegetables. Let us not forget mukombero, always a man's best friend as it increases the level of happiness at home.  They are all better suited for our changing weather patterns as they need less time and water to mature. And further afield, continuing research seems to suggest that certain types of cancers affect blacks more than whites on account of eating foods better-suited for white bodies. This is not about discrimination but adaptation perfected over thousands of years. Nature seemingly purposed what we must eat. Blacks forcefully taken into the diaspora over 400 years ago, the study suggests, still require African foods to stay healthy. Many of them don't know about this because they are not privy to the research pointers, but their bodies do. Running away from our body's factory settings is an expensive affair. So in our case, processed cereals may make you feel modern, milk stored in plastics instead of nature's gourds looks classy but healthwise, these are sugar-coated disasters in the making.  There is nothing primitive in going back to our basics if it will make us live longer and give us a higher chance at prospering.  ReplyForward