Bloom in winter_Susannah B

 

Nothing is constant. Definitely not your energy levels. Let them drop, they will rise again and you with it. Light and darkness comes and goes, during the day and during the year. Our world is cyclic, growth and decline are equally necessary. Don’t confuse rest for stagnation. It is potent, it’s moulting blackness deeply transformative.

Twenty-four seven is for fluorescent tubes and computer screens, not for humans. We need the dark. We need to disappear regularly, sink below the surface and become liquid, become dream matter, free of aim and purpose.

When we get up again in the morning, we step directly out of a world we don’t understand but cannot do without.

Our cells are working when we rest. Our job is to not disturb them. The old is cleaned out. Tissue is repaired. Deep night-time breathing supplies our blood with oxygen in a way the shallow breaths of daytime cannot.

In deep sleep thoughts are untangled and lose their grip. Questions find answers in places we have no access to while awake. Impressions and inspiration melt and send their glimmering signals back to the surface, where we can catch them the next day. When everything starts anew.

Only rest can replenish like that. Only rest. No other way is available for us. A strange little miracle we rarely have the sense to be grateful for.

We can meddle with our sleep and our recovery, but without deep rest we eventually become shells, hard on the surface and hollow inside. Tiredness leaves everything dry. Wakefulness shrinks the more it is stretched, until it can no longer hold anything, neither love nor work. Until it’s no longer wakefulness but tired waiting. And then what good will it do us?

When the desire to rest is there, you can be sure rest is your only way forward. Not the best way; the only.

So stop striving, love.
Go to bed.

 


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