ABOUT THE BOOK
Time Out: A Second Look at Nature by Callistus Mbano engages readers with an opportunity to ask, examine, and ponder critical questions that fundamentally challenge conventional thinking and beliefs. It is natural for every normal child to be curious about these questions, but we are trained at an early age that it is forbidden to ask them. As human beings, that does not stop our curiosity. We continue to seek answers from our natural environment.
Children in modern societies have fewer opportunities to play outdoors, explore nature, and ask questions of adults who ponder about life. Not examining the most fundamental questions has stifled our full human development. We go through life, confounding our reasoning with learned information built on a shaky foundation. Soon creativity and spontaneity give way to conformed behaviors.
Despite our formal education and the ways, we try to impress others with our assumed superiority, many of us quiver before indigenes from less developed societies when the topic discussed is about Nature. When we face such people in conflicts, we become disarmed by our loss of morality.
We consider ourselves fortunate to live in the most developed technological country on earth. Chained to our devices and instruments, we are increasingly losing touch with our real selves and other people on the planet. Is it any wonder that reality TV’s most popular shows are about modern people returning to primitive settings and forming tribes? Is this the only way for contemporary people to understand the basics of what it means to be human?
Amazingly in some of these reality TV shows, people continue to use the schemes and competitive methods of the modern world (in fact, the shows are competitively designed). Yet in rare situations, when modern people meet indigenes, they often find them to be communal, caring for the other even when the other is a stranger.
What if we were able to escape the ‘forbidden forest’ of conformity and dare to question and thoroughly examine popular beliefs and the things we were taught with our childlike inquisitiveness intact? Through reading this book, you can do this as Callistus explores the banned questions through his perspective as a youth educator and naturalist learner and teacher.
