Jargogled Impressions.

There are hard months and then there are hard months. You know it when you are in it. And you cannot wait to get out of it. Because time slows down and becomes a monster that you want to run away from. 

There are seasons in life when the calendar feels like a hostile witness. Days stretch and sag, refusing to move along, as though time itself were conspiring against you. A hard month is a marathon. A very hard month, though, is more like quicksand—you thrash about trying to escape, only to find yourself sinking further.

An event makes a month hard. But a confluence of events makes it something else. There’s a strong positive feedback loop of anxiety created by challenges we face. One challenge leads to another. It’s Murphy’s law in fast-track. 

Time has been known to be relative. Einstein famously said, time collapses when you are with a pretty girl and stretches when you are sitting on a hot stove. Or something like that. If you know this, then you should know that when it comes to the challenges we face, it’s so very important to understand that “this too shall pass” – that time is the ultimate healer. 

From what I have observed of people, some folks are quick to forget the bad things and others don’t and tend to hark back to them with the faintest of hints. And I have come to believe it’s not our innate nature that puts us in one camp or the other but how we have shaped our mindsets through lived experiences. Most of us bring with us the baggage of our childhood which tends to inform how we respond to the situations we deal with in our day to day life. These are the default, system-prompts that determine our responses. But these system prompts can be edited, because unlike the GenAI systems of today, our psychology has evolved over millions of years of evolution and as such have weathered many storms and came out resilient. Which means that we have the capability to edit our system prompts – we just don’t know it. 

Most parenting advice on dealing with the big emotions our kids confront tells us to name it in order to tame it. That is, calling out these emotions by name helps our kids understand that what they are feeling is genuine and has a name even though they do not yet have the ability to control it yet. It’s the same with the emotions we feel as grown ups too. I learnt from an episode on Modern wisdom podcast that the best way to develop deep relationships with our spouse is across 3 pillars: 

• Understand what you are feeling
• Communicate what you are feeling 
• Take responsibility of the day-to-day 

I have learnt that being able to understand our emotions and articulate it is a super power. Some people are born with it innately and others need to learn. It’s a spectrum (as it always is), and the extreme ends of the spectrum always have downsides that we should learn to avoid. But if we can maintain this balance between what and when to share and when to withhold, I do feel that we can strike up deep, meaningful relationships with people we care about. And I also think that having such relationships has an exponentially disproportionate effect on our lives. 

As a teenager and in my twenties, I approached my relationships without much thought. My friends, cousins, acquaintances, etc. came into my life and went away in a sort of spontaneous flow without me thinking too much about it. My first brush with really thinking deeply about it was likely when my brother went away to pursue his education outside of our hometown. Being the youngest in the group – alongside the 2 cousins we deeply shared our lives with – I was left with fending for myself the last 2 years of my life in my hometown before I too moved out. It was then that I had to really look out and build friendships that let me spend my time the way I wanted to. But these friendships were geared around having a fun time. I never named it but I did feel lonely after my cousins and my brother left. Looking back it seems that I did not need to because I was instead busy with creating a life outside of it. 

Things change though as we grow up. With the load of the increasingly bulging years of experiences and skills we develop frictions that make us less spontaneous than we used to be. When that happens, it is usually our habits and our structure that determines how we respond to big emotions. When it comes to hard months and days then, it’s our habits that determine whether we show grit or crumble under the pressure. 

Adulthood complicates things. Habits calcify, preferences sharpen, and spontaneity gets filtered through the sieve of routine. Where once you could fall into friendship by mere proximity, now it requires a kind of intentionality. Naming, once again, matters: What am I missing? What am I truly seeking?

If there’s a lesson in all this, it might be that the hardest months don’t test our willpower so much as our scaffolding. When chaos arrives, we fall back not on our aspirations but on our habits.

Do we have small rituals—writing, exercise, honest conversations—that can hold us together when everything else is unraveling? Or do we reach reflexively for distraction, complaint, and blame?

In other words: when time turns monstrous, what keeps us human?

Perhaps the answer lies not in escaping the quicksand but in knowing how to breathe within it. To remind ourselves that “this too shall pass” is not a platitude but a geological truth. Time does move on. Our job is to remain intact, perhaps even wiser, when it finally does.

And so I wonder: the next time a hard month comes knocking—and it will—what system prompt will I choose to run?