Almost all of your life is lived by the seat of your pants one unexpected event crashing into another with no pattern or reason and then you finally reach a point around my age where you spend more time than ever looking back. Why did this happen? Look where that led? You see the shape of things.
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English Mandarin or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.