The school year is starting to wrap up, and I took a moment to really think about life’s little treasures. One phrase that stood out to me is one that I’ve recently had luck with.

Expect the unexpected.

I feel like this is something you hear your entire life. You see it in love stories all the time, how romance appears when the character least expects it, like a rose blossoming in the dead of winter. Or, if you’re like me and scroll through Cosmopolitan’s horoscope on Snapchat, then you might see the phrase all the time.

The past couple of years have been pretty planned out for me. Apply to college, get into college, get good grades, narrow down my major, look for internships. I have to say, everything I’ve done recently has been rather expected. That is, until this year.

2018 started as a simple extension of what my daily life had been like since I started the school year. When my anxiety doesn’t hinder me, I meet new people all the time. It is rare that the people I meet will become incredibly significant in my life. So, when the series of friends came into my life this past year led up to a relationship that I had not foreseen, I was blatantly surprised.

As I was growing stronger in my confidence and independence, I willingly tried to push away something that would have been great for me. On my formulated academic schedule, the unexpected entered into my life, and I did not expect it, as people had once told me to.

I was hit with a decision of whether or not I was going to embrace the unexpected. After trying to dismiss a great blessing that arrived at the least expected time, I finally allowed myself to accept. By receiving instead of rejecting, I embarked on a new journey that has brought so much excitement and anticipation into my life.

So, what you can learn from my experience is that embracing the unforeseen or unanticipated can bring you to a point in which you can relax with your confining agenda and open your eyes to a spontaneous world. The joy that the unexpected has brought to me when I was least expecting it has lightened my life, something everyone hopes for in the end.