Hello dear friends and thank you for joining me for this new episode of Marchez Avec Johan. Before we start… come on, I know we’re talking about personal development, but I invite you to follow the first link in the description to follow the free Authentic French course “ 7 rules for speaking French without getting stuck ”. This course, even if you’ve already seen it, I invite you to watch it again because it gives you my system, my entire method for learning to speak French without getting stuck.
Today, I would like to talk to you about one of my thoughts, a thought that came to me following one of my readings. And it really touched me, it's a subject that speaks to me a lot. And it's a book that I've already talked about, eh, it's a book by Jean d'Ormesson which is I will say despite everything that this life was beautiful. I quoted this work two weeks ago in the podcast We're never too old to learn . But so, this book, I highlighted a lot of passages, as usual, and there is a passage that I really liked in which Jean d'Ormesson says: "It seems to me sometimes that things have almost happened by themselves and that I have nothing to do with it". I'm going to repeat that: "It seems to me sometimes that things have almost happened by themselves and that I have nothing to do with it".
And in fact, by saying that, he reflects or he reflects on his life. He says that in fact he has the impression that all the beautiful things that happened to him happened a bit by chance without him having anything to do with it, they happened like that, he doesn't really know why.
So, already, it is for me a great sign of humility to recognize it and it resonates enormously with my life and with what I think, it really resonates, I'll tell you why right after, but it also resonates with things that I have read and in particular a book that I often quote, because I find it very... yeah, it pushed me a little to think laos whatsapp number data differently, it is Le hasard sauvage by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who actually said... 'well, that's not what he said. One of the theses of his book is that chance governs our lives enormously and that as human beings we always try to give a rational explanation or to say "well, it was planned, what happened to me". But very often, it is chance in fact. Very very often, we explain things a posteriori, when in fact it is chance that governs the world.
So, of course, I want to add a little spiritual dimension to it because I think, personally, recently, I told my journey in this podcast, but I think that behind chance there is someone, but that, ultimately, is not the subject of today. We can talk about chance, we can talk about the universe, we can talk about providence, we can talk about God, we can talk about whatever we want, but it would seem that the events that happen to us are the fruit of something or someone.
And I have the same feeling as him. I could have written it myself. Unfortunately, I don't have the talent of Jean d'Ormesson, but I could very well have written that. It sometimes seems to me that things happened almost by themselves and that I have nothing to do with it. Because if I reflect on my life a little, if I think about what happened, I realize that everything actually happened naturally. In French, we would say in a somewhat colloquial way "tout s'est bien goupillé". That means things happened naturally and thing A that happened to me today, 'fin that happened to me yesterday, fits perfectly with thing B that happened to me today. It's something natural, harmonious. And in fact, all that, I have nothing to do with it, really.
When I think about my life, I realize that the major decisions that I made naturally, without thinking, I made them sometimes even without thinking, in a natural way, without really or literally without spending hours and hours trying to find the best possible solution or to know if it was the best decision, well they turned out to be good, these key decisions that I made, but they could have been disastrous, really, if I had been wrong. I'll give you two or three examples that came to mind, but suddenly it pushes me to be lucky, to feel gratitude because I am very lucky.
The first thing that comes to mind is my wife Celine, who I met, I think, in 2000 or 2001, and we've been together since 2002. So, that's 22 years today. I've spent more time with her than without her in my life and I really intend to be with her until the end of our days together. It's a key decision actually, the person we're going to stay with, the person we're in a relationship with because, for me, there is no happy life, clearly, without a happy relationship. It's impossible actually.