My son turned 10 last year. And somewhere between the cake and the chaos, I found myself doing that thing parents do when they think no one is watching: standing back, slightly apart from the noise, and marvelling, not just at him, but at time itself.

When I was asked to write about growth and time this month, about the things you can only learn by living them, I thought: yes. This is exactly the conversation I want to have.

“This too shall pass” is perhaps the oldest piece of change science there is.

It’s been passed down across cultures and centuries because it is stubbornly, reliably true.

Suffering ends. Seasons turn. And the thing that feels unsurvivable, you survive. But you can’t really know that until you’ve survived a few things.

Psychologists who study what’s called temporal imagination, our capacity to travel mentally through time, have found that the further back we can look, the further forward we can see.

In other words, depth of experience expands our capacity to imagine the future. People who have lived through more tend to think in longer arcs. They are less rattled by short-term turbulence, and better at holding complexity.

This is not because they are cleverer, but because they have more data points, and crucially, they’ve learned to trust the data.

I’m in my mid-50s, and I’ve been reflecting on the knowledge I carry that I could not have had at 35, no matter how many books I’d read or courses I’d taken.

I know that most conflicts, when you wait long enough, reveal themselves to be about fear. I know that people rarely change when you tell them they should, but often change when they feel genuinely seen.

I know, too, that the things I was most ashamed of in my 30s – the relationships that didn’t work, the failures I carried quietly for years – are now the experiences I draw on most in my work.

I know that waiting is not the same as passivity, that sometimes, the most intelligent thing you can do for now, is nothing.

There’s a season for pushing and a season for sitting with uncertainty. The art is in knowing which is which.

None of this came from a seminar. It came from living past the thing I was sure I couldn’t overcome, over and over again.

As a species, we are impatient with slow growth. We want results, transformation, breakthroughs.

We want the butterfly, but we are uncomfortable with the chrysalis, that formless middle phase where nothing seems to be happening and everything is.

But some things genuinely cannot be rushed – grief, trust, wisdom.

Psychologist Erik Erikson mapped human development across eight stages, each building on what came before, each requiring that we live through the previous stage rather than skipping it.

You cannot short-circuit stage five by attending a workshop on stage seven. The work of each phase is the phase.

And yet we keep trying to skip ahead. We treat confusion as a problem to solve rather than a stage to inhabit. We pathologise uncertainty instead of recognising it as a precondition of change.

Humans mark time for good reason. Birthdays, anniversaries and year-ends invite us to pause the forward motion of living and ask: what has actually happened here?

They give us permission to look back. And looking back is what makes looking forward possible.

A birthday, for a company or a person, is an invitation to take stock, not just of achievements or milestones, but of the subtler things. How have we changed? What do we know now that we didn’t?

What did the hard years teach us that the good years couldn’t? What do we want to carry forward, and what is it finally time to put down?

My son, 11 now, has a different relationship with time than I do. To him, five years ago is almost ancient history. To me, it was yesterday. The longer you’ve been in the game, the more you understand it.

There’s a confidence that can only come from having survived your worst fears. From having been completely sure something would break you, and then not being broken.

It’s different from the confidence of youth, which is often borrowed from potential. This is the confidence of evidence, of knowing in your body that you have endured before and will endure again.

In a brittle and anxious world, it might be one of the most valuable things we have.

To anyone who is somewhere in the thick of a chapter they didn’t choose, remember that the slow medicine of time is working, even when you can’t feel it.

Trust the process. Not blindly – we should always be learning and adjusting. But trust that the time you are spending inside the difficult thing is not wasted. It is accumulating. It is becoming something.

This too shall pass. And when it does, you will know things you cannot know right now.