Why I Always Believe Something Wonderful Is About To Happen... And Why You Should Too

This past week I was travelling. This time it was entirely for pleasure rather than work, which is something of a rarity for me. Before I left, I made a promise to myself: I wouldn’t turn any part of it into content. No vlogs. No carefully composed photographs for Instagram. No filming, editing or thinking about what I would post next. I simply wanted to be present.

The consequence of that decision was that, for the first time in a very long time, I woke up this Friday morning without a Substack article waiting to be published. More unusually still, I had no idea what I was going to write.

As I sat with my coffee, my mind wandered back over the past week. It had been a week of complete joy from beginning to end. A trip I never imagined I would take. The sort of memories that become part of you. It left me feeling profoundly grateful for the strange and wonderful way life unfolds.

Then I found myself thinking back to the beginning of this year.

Life looked very different then. I was in a much darker place. If someone had shown me a glimpse of the life I would be living just a few months later, I simply wouldn’t have believed them. The people I would meet, the experiences I would have, the opportunities that would appear, the way I would feel... it all seemed so impossibly far away.

And that reminded me of something I’ve come to believe with complete conviction.

This isn’t intended to be an airy essay about positivity because, if you’re going through something difficult, relentless optimism can feel hollow. It’s often the last thing you want to hear.

But I do want to offer you one thought that has carried me through some of the hardest periods of my own life.

Whatever you’re living through today, your story is almost certainly incomplete.

Something wonderful is just around the corner.

I don’t know what it will be. Neither do you.

But that’s precisely the point.

Life has a remarkable habit of surprising us when we’ve convinced ourselves that nothing is changing. The happiest chapters of my life have never announced their arrival. They’ve appeared quietly, often when I least expected them, and almost always after a period when I’d begun to wonder whether anything exciting would ever happen again.

That’s why I always believe something wonderful is about to happen.

Not because life is always easy.

But because life is endlessly unpredictable.

And if it has surprised me before, I have every reason to believe it will surprise me again.

For me, it began with a succession of sadness and, for someone who has always felt that life has been remarkably kind, it came as something of a shock to the system.

In January, my aunt died suddenly in her sleep.

She was incredibly special to me. Growing up, she was like a second mother. My brother, sister and I would spend one night most weekends at her house, and somehow she always managed to make it feel magical. She would cook all our favourite meals, bake with us, organise games, get out the craft box, and we’d end the evening watching terrible television together.

But what I remember most isn’t any of those things.

It was the way she spoke to us.

She never spoke down to us simply because we were children. She spoke to us as through our thoughts mattered. She would tell us about her day, ask about ours, share what she was thinking and listen intently to whatever we had to say. Looking back, I realise what a gift that was. She made us feel interesting long before we’d done anything interesting at all.

As the years passed, the weekend sleepovers naturally came to an end. Life became busier. We all grew older. I visited less often than I once had.

And yet nothing ever really changed.

Whenever I arrived, I could walk straight into her kitchen, help myself to something from the fridge, open the biscuit tin without asking, and we’d slip effortlessly into conversation as though we’d only seen each other the day before.

Some relationships never lose their ease.

Ours was one of them.

It was the first death in my life that brought real grief.

I had lost grandparents before and, of course, I was deeply saddened by their passing. But they had lived long lives, and I could console myself with the knowledge that they had reached old age. It felt like the natural order of things. My aunt was different. She was still relatively young, and I simply assumed there would be more time. More conversations, more visits, more ordinary afternoons in her kitchen.

How easily we mistake expectation for certainty.

Then, in early February, my beloved dog Sophie, who was fourteen, became suddenly unwell and died.

Although I knew that day would come eventually, nothing can truly prepare you for it. From the day I brought Sophie home, I dreaded the day I would have to say goodbye. That is one of the hardest things about loving an animal. From the moment they become part of your family, you know that, one day, they will leave it.

Sophie was an enormous part of my life. She had been beside me through almost all of my adult years. I had deliberately built a life that allowed her to be with me for nearly everything I did. She came to work with me, travelled with me, and was there for the ordinary routines that make up a life.

When my relationship of ten years came to an end, Sophie was there too. Those were some of the darkest days of my life, and she seemed to know exactly when I needed her. She would climb onto the sofa, rest her little head on my lap, and somehow make everything feel better.

As though those two losses were not enough, a few weeks later I found myself navigating the end of a relationship that had brought me more heartache than I could have imagined. Someone I had trusted turned out not to be the person I believed they were, and I was left trying to make sense of it all.

Three painful blows arrived within the space of a few short months.

I remember wondering when life would begin to feel lighter again. At the time, it was impossible to imagine that I was standing at the end of one chapter rather than the middle of it. I couldn’t see that life was already preparing to surprise me in ways I never expected.

Because the truth is, no matter what has happened in my life, something wonderful has always come along.

There have been times when I have been convinced there was no way through. Times when a situation felt impossible to fix, or when I couldn’t imagine life ever feeling different. And yet, without fail, life has found a way of surprising me.

It rarely happens in the way I expect, and almost never when I think it should. But somehow, a new opportunity appears, an unexpected invitation arrives, a chance encounter changes everything, or a new chapter begins before I’ve even realised the last one has ended.

That is why I have learned never to lose faith in what tomorrow might bring. Not because life is always easy, but because it is wonderfully unpredictable.

It didn’t happen overnight, and it certainly didn’t happen in the way I imagined it would. There wasn’t a single moment where everything suddenly felt better. Instead, life began to reveal itself in small, unexpected ways.

New opportunities appeared. Exciting invitations landed in my inbox. My writing reached more people than ever before. I found myself travelling to places I never imagined I would visit, having conversations I never expected to have, and making memories that, only a few months earlier, would have felt impossible.

Most importantly, I found myself looking forward again.

I stopped wondering whether life would ever feel joyful and started becoming excited about what the next few months might hold.

The most meaningful changes in my life have often been the ones I never saw coming. Some of them I’ve shared with you over the years. Others I’m choosing to keep to myself for now.

When life feels heavy, we have a tendency to believe that this is simply how it is now. That the sadness will last forever. That we’ve already seen the best our lives have to offer.

But we haven’t.

Somewhere ahead of you is a conversation you don’t yet know you’ll have. An invitation you aren’t expecting. A place you’ve never been. An opportunity you can’t yet imagine. A day that will begin like any other and end with your life looking completely different.

The wonderful thing is that none of us knows when that moment will arrive.

And that is exactly why I always believe something wonderful is about to happen.

Because, time and time again, life has proved me right.

And please don’t mistake this for naivety. I know there will be more sadness. There will be more grief. There will be more days when life feels unfair, because that is simply part of being alive. None of us escapes it.

But the older I become, the more confidence I have in my ability to carry those seasons when they come. Not because I have become harder, but because life has taught me something I once struggled to believe.

Just as grief finds us without warning, so too do joy, hope and the most unexpected blessings. Time and again, life has surprised me with moments I could never have planned, people I never expected to meet, and experiences I never imagined I would have.

So whenever life feels especially difficult, I remind myself of one simple truth.

Something wonderful is about to happen.

And more often than not, it does.

Nicolas x