After my older sister and my older brother were born, my mother lost two pregnancies, including what used to be called a "stillborn" birth. I don't have to imagine what she and my father felt when I was born -- I have lived a full life under the lasting influence of their sense of relief and intense concern for the well-being of their third child.

It is a joy to feel wanted. Even though I lost my parents when I was not yet 17 years old, that feeling has never worn off in the intervening 45 years.

As I strive to understand the essence of life in the context of a network of supportive family and friends, I realize that any lack of clarity in my thoughts is of my own making and cannot be blamed on the efforts of a system to foil my plans or intentions. I have experienced and I continue to experience love, fulfillment, desire, and longing: continually, simultaneously, and deeply.

When I am looking for a re-connection to the mysterious source of inspiration that sometimes enables me to express ideas that may further my understanding, there are so many places that I can go, but often it is music that attracts me at such times. This morning I went to the archived folders on the computer and looked for one called "AssortedOldThings includes Kirks music," where a sub-folder contains the files that my friend Kirk Auston downloaded to my computer from his system once when I was visiting him at his home near Pomona Lake, perhaps in 2012 or 2013. I'm listening on headphones to Beyonce's "Dangerously in Love" album.

Yesterday I had a medical check-up with a nurse practioner who is my primary care professional on my health plan. She sat with me for longer than I can ever remember a doctor's appointment going. A few months ago, she and others were trying to persuade me to have my gall bladder removed, but eventually I kept it, because it is still injecting bile, just not with as much force as when my body was younger. But I found some ways to treat my gall bladder more gently, by cutting way down on fatty foods and also reducing my sugar intake. Almost without trying, I have lost about 15 pounds, which was not my intention, but a nice indirect result.

Later in the day, I had some e-mail correspondence to attend to related to my work, which pulled me away from some reading of comprehensive exams that I was trying to finish on a deadline. And there were also of course things that my wife and I wanted to talk about, and other things that our 17-year-old son needed to talk about. At one point in the afternoon, I stepped over to where my wife was composing, and interrupted her work to express that there was "so much to do," before taking a breath and getting back to it, after receiving affection and encouragement from her to keep me going.

At the end of the afternoon, I sat in my study and turned on (without headphones) some old Linda Ronstadt from her 1976 "Hasten Down the Wind" album, turning up the volume a little and then quite a bit louder. There is emotional content in those songs, and I became emotional myself, with tears welling up in my eyes, yet a deep sense of happiness and contentment.

As it turns out, the title song on that Linda Ronstadt album was composed by the late Warren Zevon, and there is a nice recording of him performing it on youtube. There are a few lines that seem to express something of essence:

"She's so many women;
He can't find the one who was his friend;
So he's hanging on to half her heart;
He can't have the restless part..."

As I started to think about what I wanted to write this morning, I did not realize the introduction would turn out so long and almost rambling.

My concern is that there is so much pressure on young people today and too often they are not presented with positive examples by adults in our communities or positions of leadership via the media; examples that ideally would show our youth what it means to assess one's life honestly and to do a real accounting of our mistakes in order to learn from them and improve ourselves. A related problem is that we do not have enough of a sense of humor that would allow us to take ourselves less seriously once in a while and just laugh a little at the imperfect human condition.

One of greatest things about president-elect Joe Biden is that he has imperfections and is honest about them. For some reason, while writing that sentence, a memory came to mind from a day in 1974 (I think it was) when my mother and father and little brother and I drove out to the local airport and flew somewhere and came back, and at some point during those several hours she had become upset at my dad and uttered a profanity, which was very unusual behavior for her, as anyone who knew her could attest (although there are fewer witnesses to the wonders of Virginia Lee Huffman Scott as the years keep going by).

We got back on the ground, retrieved the car and closed the plane inside the hangar, and started the drive back into town. At that point, my mother turned around in her seat and apologized to my brother and me for having cursed in our presence earlier.

It takes a lot of strength and effort to maintain a denial of reality. The current president and a number of politicians on all sides display the toll of such stress and strain in their visages daily. And it is not just in political realms that this happens. How often in your life has a figure of authority admitted making a mistake? In many systems, they really must feel they do not have permission to admit making errors, from what I have seen in decades of working within organizations supposedly dedicated to education, learning, development, and growth.

Ironically, the message that students, youth, and fellow laborers receive is either that their mentors and supervisors don't make errors or that errors must be hidden at any cost.

Either way, our youth are not given meaningful opportunities to learn by example about a healthier process, in which a truly strong man or woman is continually self-evaluating and reflecting on outcomes for the purpose of identifying areas for improvement and growth.

I sent a priority mail envelope a week ago and became more frustrated with each passing day as the tracking app indicated an inexplicable delay. When seven days have passed, you are allowed to file a missing mail complaint, which I did, but on that same day the item was finally delivered, a full week after it was mailed. I found a way to call into the local post office at the destination town, wanting to express (vent) my frustration at the delay.

The person who picked up the phone was one of the first real humans I have spoken to recently in such situations, as opposed to the usual "company line" and refusal to take responsibility that one encounters when calling to complain about service.

This individual and I had about a ten minute conversation, after he honestly told me that the postal system has struggled during the pandemic with workloads on a par with what in past years were only associated with the Christmas holiday season. We talked about our country, the tough times everyone is going through, and ended up having had some decent, honest human communication.

Before the conversation was over, we even laughed together over a joke he told me he had heard from a friend who recently went through Covid-19:

According to the new lockdown rules, you can only have 10 people together for a social gathering, but, if it's a funeral you can have a larger number. So, one fellow's solution has been to invite friends and relatives to a "funeral" for his bird that passed away, on what used to be called "Thanksgiving."

Report by Robb Scott
editor@multilingualadaptive.net

2021 The Multilingual Adaptive Systems Newsletter