Chronic fatigue and having the confidence that bad moments will pass

This is something quite important I think. There are many bad times with chronic fatigue - times that are quite humbling for active, getting-things-done kind of people. Quite often there are periods when things are going well punctuated with sudden collapses in energy for no apparent reason. There's a lot of mental struggle that can happen when it goes wrong yet again, but after a few years I've grown to respect these bad times and let them play themselves out. This "letting go" state of mind helps me more than trying to fight with the symptoms as they get worse and worse. Part of this "letting go" is having confidence that these bad moments will pass.

This confidence or internal faith is an important mental idea and it also crops up in Buddhist psychology as part of transcendental dependant origination. Transcendental dependant origination is a logical set of steps that lead from suffering to enlightenment, with various nice things along the way. The message I get from it is that there is a way that having the confidence that things will change inevitably leads to more positive states of mind. This is great news - difficulty leads to happiness if you hang in there.

The full steps (in brief) are:

- Suffering
- Faith/confidence
- Joy
- Rapture
- Tranquility
- Happiness
- Concentration
- Knowledge
- Disenchantment
- Dispassion
- Freedom
- Enlightenment

Faith then, wherever we can find it, is having the wisdom to let go into some greater agency and allowing life to progress naturally without "our" efforts to control it. It is a marvellous thing to cultivate.