It’s hard to tell if my conscience is more like a tar baby, or more like a hand rail.

Maybe it’s a tar covered hand rail. A handrail along the straight and narrow that get’s me all sticky, and glued to it. I’m wondering if my conscience is meant to keep me on my path, or meant to keep me stuck.

Or, it may be meant for something totally different, perhaps outdated, or just very basic.

Conscience must be one of those special use tools. It’s like a hammer. It works real good for nails, but not for scraping ice off a windshield. Or a tool like the weather station, which may predict hurricanes, and tornadoes, but isn’t any help with earthquakes or volcanos.

If I count only on this conscience of mine to guide me, I still get into trouble, and karma. I stay stuck. Or even dig myself in deeper trying to defend it.

It seems my conscience plays by the rules I already know. It does not cover what my consciousness doesn’t cover. Whatever my consciousness is, so is my conscience. If my consciousness is narrow, so is my conscience.

By narrow, I mean it has a small umbrella, doesn’t cover much. I can do everything wicked outside my umbrella without a pang. It’s how, when I’m a soldier, under orders, committing murder somehow doesn’t equal murder. That’s conscience for you. It plays.

Or maybe it’s following some life purpose or blueprint like what I came to learn or perhaps what I learned in a past life didn’t work. I don’t think it covers what I haven’t, at some time, already learned.

As I grow, so does my conscience. I have to believe something is wrong for my conscience to work me. It doesn’t function with what anyone else believes. It only works with what I feel, and believe is right or wrong. When my beliefs change, so does my conscience. I don’t have a conscience, without something to base it on. No one has the same conscience, I guess.

So, now, I’m only counting on it for what I already know, or have known, sometime.

The unexplored worlds beyond my present experience, for these, I figure, my heart knows, and will know what is right for me. My feet know their path, too. They can keep me on my straight and narrow: straight, because it is always the step straight ahead. It’s narrow, because only I fit on it. My path is only mine. My heart figures stuff out, then tells my conscience. That’s how I must have come to have some conscience so far.

I learn by experience, vicarious or otherwise. My personal conscience also seems to be made up of what I’m taught, when I actually believe it. If I don’t believe it or feel it, no conscience for that one. If I believe a lie, then my conscience may bug me for something like walking barefoot, or telling the truth.

Until my conscience grows up, I’m dangerous.

A wild-eyed, grinning toddler.