Life in a shoelace

I have a pair of brown sneakers I really like. They've got a lot of assets: comfortable, my feet don't smell even if I wear them all day, they're kind of original in the sense that I've never seen anybody else wear them. All in all, a great shoe. There's just one thing that's really annoying about them: the shoelaces are kind of weird, because they don't really keep in a knot but open up all the time (it's a problem of material, I think, it's too slippery). I've tried everything: binding them loosely, very tightly, double knots, etc. Nothing seems to help, they just always unloosen at one point or another during the day (though the double knots work pretty well).
Maybe my life is a bit like those sneakers. As much as I would like to control it, to make it fit to the path I think I want to take, life just happens (as if it were a person, I would say life does whatever it wants without asking me), escaping all my efforts of thightening and of trying to keep everything in place. Like the shoelaces, life keeps unloosening at the strangest, sometimes most annoying, very often most unexpected moments - and I find myself tripping and struggeling to keep my pace.
Now, obviously, one could say: "Geez, why don't you change the shoelaces? Get some new ones!" Problem being of course that I like the shoe exactly the way it is right now - untying shoelaces and all. It's like John Goodman aka Walter says to Jeff Bridges aka the Dude in The Big Lebowski: "That rug really tied the room together."