I remember this was one of the more common phrases I grew up hearing most of my life. Usually it was something adults would say to one another in passing. I’ve always been real metiche so from what I could gather it always seemed like it was being used as a form of consolation. Like “there, there, everything is going to be okay.”
What the specific situations were that required consolation I don’t recall. Even if I did I don’t think it was in me at that young age to truly understand what the real issues might have been. But again, one of my favorite pastimes as a kid was hanging around the adults listening to what they were talking about and trying my best to decipher what exactly they meant.
I mean ask my eldest sister and she will tell you. At one point in her early dating years she became so annoyed with my nosy and pestering behavior as a huerco that she took the banana she had brought with her from our apartment to the park where she was meeting her then boyfriend (along with all of kids as her chaperones) that she peeled it and plastered it atop my head and then along my face to express her frustration. Needless to say after that happened I was pretty quiet the rest of the walk home.
Pero, unfortunately for her, that only dissuaded me from my annoying ways for the moment.
A few hours later it was back to metiche business as usual.
But going back to that expression. La vida cambia, la vida da mil vueltas, is something that only started to make sense to me later on in life. Como quien dice, hasta que me calló el veinte.
And I’m pretty sure that’s probably quite normal. The older we get the more we learn. The harder the falls the more memorable the lesson. The more experience of our own we gain the more we understand the decisions we didn’t quite understand before. And hence, there you go, I guess that’s the cycle of life really. Until you live it for yourself sometimes you just don’t get it.
The other thing that’s true is that you just really never know where life will take you tomorrow.
That’s the conversation I was having over the phone with my jefita this weekend. She said something that really stuck with me then, that I think might also apply to this line of thinking about life turning and changing constantly.
Uno hace planes y la vida pasa.
Here’s a very loose translation.
We make plans and then life happens.