My broken moral compass

There's no good without bad, no light without darkness, no definition of right without a definition of wrong. The moral compass in every human being is more or less set at birth or so I think. You know if you play with fire, you get burnt and if you swim in ice, well you will most probably die of hypothermia. It's a basic lesson.

As we grow older, the lines between right and wrong start to become fuzzy and fade into a blur. Soon we want to see what would happen if we hopped from one side to the other. We wonder how much it would burn if we put our hands over a flame. If you are fortunate, the first pain is enough to deter you from personal distraction but not most of us are that fortunate. First you put the hand, get used to the pain, the you put the whole arm and before you know it, your whole body is tied to a skewer and rotating around a bonfire.

The fact that I go to church doesn't abdicate me from a life of crime and debauchery. In fact far from it. Sometimes I even think it fuels it. Testing to see how far you can go before God gets pissed enough to smite me. So what happens when the morals that your parents tried for decades to instill in you get crashed by a bus and are left for dead? Walking down K-Street looking down my nose at all those naked girls doesn't make me any better than them. I mean, hell isn't divided in chambers for those who sinned more than the others.

When I sat for my KCSE, they tortured our young minds with a poem called "The Road Less Travelled". Something about a yellow roa in the woods. The questions made absolutely no sense. Morality is definitely a road less travelled. At least not in this day and age. I don't know about days and ages before, I wasn't alive then. But it is a hardly walked on road. I don't even have to go very far to find out, all I have to do is look at the mirror to realise that my morality has been flushed down the toilet and taken my conscience right down with it.

Our morality sometimes gets lost in the on-goings of life. You keep thinking if you do something enough times and in so many different ways that what you once thought was wrong will becomes right. What you once thought was a black and white situation turns into a pale grey. Every time you do or say something ludicrous becomes the last time until it just doesn't. I guess we can blame it on society and its pressures and stresses but does society have to define who we are? Just because the sun is scorching hot doesn't make it right to walk around the CBD with nothing on but the love of Christ. It makes it understandable; but never ever right.

Of course with time the world has made some things more bearable to go around. Some of what we thought was unthinkable when we were a young and naive pentecostal followers in high school becomes the norm. Eventually we forget what defined us then and start being defined by new ideals (if you can even call them ideals) Responsibilities or lack thereof start making up what we believe and understand. Doing what is right becomes a far,far cry at the back of our minds. There is a new North and it has no morals people.

I have been trying to fight to get back my moral North for a while now and failing miserably.I guess this road is less traveled than most so it is a bit harder to come by once you lose it and every day is a battle to hold on to something that is good instead of something that feels good. Of course dunia ni ile ile, so this battle will not be an easy one to win but I can always hope. It is definitely time to buy a new compass and find that road. At least before its too late.