YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Idiom: (Just) the way it goes
In life, bad things happen; that’s just the way it goes.
I know these words may not be words of encouragement, but they are the truth.
Call it fate.
Call it destiny.
You can call it whatever you want but understand that it’s how things work out.
When things don’t go your way, and you have no explanation for why things happened the way they did, you can say that’s just the way it goes.
It may sound like defeatism, and it could be, but I prefer to look at it as a form of wisdom.
Look at our little bluebird in the water today.
Yes, I know he doesn’t like it when you stare at him.
He’s wet and can’t do anything about it, so stare at him all you want.
Do you think he woke up this morning and decided he would get stuck in the water today?
No, of course, he didn’t.
He’s probably skimmed over the water’s surface, catching bugs and floating blueberries 1,000 times before today.
Today, however, for some reason, he fell in, and that’s just the way it goes.
Now he’s all wet and needs a hand to get out.
Pretty soon, he’ll be hypothermic.
No, this is not the day he planned, for sure.
The same is true for us humans.
Things happen for unexplainable reasons.
A co-worker gets a promotion instead of you.
It suddenly begins to rain, and you don’t have an umbrella.
Or, and this one is my favourite, you bring homemade curry to work for lunch and realize you forgot to pack a spoon.
You have chopsticks but no spoon.
How are you going to eat curry with chopsticks?
I suggest doing it very carefully.
That’s just the way it goes.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 85.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.