Now before your mind goes drifting away, I must clarify that I'm not talking about a sinful chocolate cake or naughty toys.
But hey, don't turn the page just yet. If you're a woman...ok, scratch that. If you're a human being, and an adult one at that, you will understand what I'm talking about.
Guilt comes when you go against certain rules. Sometimes, the rules are written somewhere. Sometimes they are not. You know what time you're supposed to report to work but you're always taking a few extra minutes at home to be a slave of the snooze button on your alarm or to take a longer shower than usual. The rules are written. 8am.
But there's that moment in the shower where instead of turning the shower off, you turn the knob on the tap to reduce the flow of water and make the instant shower hotter so you can extend the pleasure of the hot water on your aching upper back. You tell yourself that you'll hop on a matatu so you won't spend the usual 30 minutes looking for parking.
But there are some unwritten rules that force unwelcome guilt on you. Like only 'checking' your child's homework in the morning, when you only have time to sign without looking before you hear the school bus hooting. When you call your father once again having forgotten to check on that pending title deed.
It's not a chocolate-cake-for-breakfast kind of guilt because there's no guilty pleasure that comes with it. It's not what you did but what you failed to do.
Welcome to adulthood, where opportunities for guilt wait at every corner. And the man to blame is responsibility.
