Did you know that when a bear hibernates, it doesn’t urinate or defecate for up to 7 months?

This adaptation is what allows the bear to stay in its den and wait out the winter season.

Sometimes I wish I could rest like a bear—to be entirely waste free for months at a time.

No wetting the bed, no messups, no foul mood swings or ungraceful actions.

When I need rest, and don’t allow myself to, my negative qualities tend to blossom—anxiety, fear, doubt arise—waste is created.

I find that when I don’t allow myself to rest, it is because I am holding onto something that needs to be let go.

Inevitably, when we let go, rest can wash over us, our waste is reduced: we allow ourselves to be humans again.

but between those moments—the tiredness and the allowing—we become lesser versions of ourselves: we create suffering.

We wander from one thing to the next like a hungry ghost: not entirely alive, but not dead either, and constantly striving for more.