Parable

 

Once the elder of the monastery of Optina Joseph was walking in the forest and he was told that there were also isolated in the forest. The elder said:

This is a dangerous path of loneliness, passions grow, but in humans it is not useful. Look, where people walk, on the road, there the grass does not grow and where they do not walk, there it is thick. It does us good when we are pressured. The tree that the wind shakes the most, strengthens its roots more and this in silence, then falls immediately down.