The French have this saying…
C’est la vie.
More aptly put;
“That’s life.”
Those two words carry the weight of centuries of human experience, wrapped in what I’d call a linguistic shrug, that somehow manages to be both profound and casual at the same time.
You’re not resigning nor giving up. It’s something much more sophisticated at a deeper look.
It’s a soft sigh of acceptance that acknowledges life doesn’t give a damn about your carefully crafted plans. You know that feeling when everything you’ve mapped out gets completely derailed?
When the job falls through, the relationship implodes, the project you poured your heart into gets rejected, the pandemic cancels your entire year, the diagnosis changes everything?
We’ve all been there and got the t-shirt.
Most of us respond to these moments by losing our absolute shit. We rage against the unfairness, demand explanations from a universe that doesn’t owe us any, exhaust ourselves trying to force square pegs into round holes.
The French just say c’est la vie and pour another glass of wine.
There’s wisdom in that response that goes deeper than it appears.
It might even come across as being passive or fatalistic. Now I’m sure we understand that life is fundamentally unpredictable, and fighting that reality is like screaming at the ocean for being cold, wet and deadly.
Your plans were beautiful. Your timeline made perfect sense. Your vision of how things should unfold was logical and well-thought-out. And life laughed in the face of all of it, because life doesn’t read your fucking calendar.
C’est la vie.
There will be detours. The mess isn’t interrupting your life; it is your life. The unexpected turns, the sudden stops, the routes you never planned to take…
That’s where the actual story happens even if the story feels like an absolute shit show on the surface.
Every person you admire has a biography full of detours that seemed like disasters at the time. The failed business that led to the breakthrough idea. The rejection that forced them to try something better. The crisis that revealed strengths they didn’t know they had.
None of it was part of their original plan. All of it was essential to who they became.
There’s beauty in accepting that you’re not the director of this movie.
You’re just the protagonist stumbling through scenes you didn’t write, with dialogue you’re making up as you go along. Sometimes the lighting is perfect and your lines are brilliant. Sometimes you trip over the furniture and forget what you were supposed to say.
C’est la vie.
This doesn’t mean becoming a doormat or abandoning your ambitions. It means holding your plans lightly enough that you can do that little jiggle wiggle thing? (Pivot lol), especially when reality demands it.
It means finding grace in the gap between what you expected and what actually happened.
The French understand something about living that other cultures seem to miss…
You can’t control the story, but you can control how you respond to it. You can rage against every plot twist, or you can trust that even the detours have something to teach you.
There’s gonna be mess. But there’s also going to be beauty.
In the way you adapt when everything falls apart. In the strength you discover when you’re forced to improvise. In the stories you’ll tell years later about the time when nothing went according to plan and somehow everything worked out anyway.
C’est la vie doesn’t make you give up on your dreams.
It’s more about giving you a little slap and letting you know that there’s no way you can dictate exactly how those dreams come true.
Sometimes the most profound wisdom comes wrapped in the simplest phrases. Sometimes the French really do have it figured out.
Stephen Walker.