One Must Not Flee the Occasions for Doing Good That Present Themselves

If you wish always to press on toward what lies ahead on the path of virtue without stopping, you must pay careful attention and in no way allow to slip from your hands whatever may serve you as an occasion for acquiring virtue. Therefore those do poorly who with all their might avoid every kind of adversity on the path of virtue, adversity that could nonetheless serve them for successful progress along it. For example, if you wish to acquire the habit of patience, you must not avoid those persons, situations, and circumstances that most try your patience. Rather, meet them willingly, with the firm resolve to submit yourself to their unpleasant effect on you, while preparing to endure it with unshakeable tranquility of spirit. If you act otherwise, you will never acquire the habit of patience.

In the same way you must relate to a task that you dislike, either because of its nature, or because it is assigned to you by a person you do not love, or because it draws you away from something you enjoy—that is, you must not shrink from it, but on the contrary, take it up without dragging your feet, and then carry it through to completion, acting as though it were the most pleasant thing in the world to you, and yielding not at all to the inner distress it causes, especially when the thought occurs that if only this task were not there, you would be perfectly at peace. Otherwise you will never learn how to bear the difficulties that come your way; nor will you find the true peace you seek by fleeing such occasions—clearly, by self-indulgence—since that peace does not dwell in self-indulgent hearts.

The same I advise you to do regarding the thoughts that sometimes attack and disturb your mind when you recall the wrongs of other people and other improper things. Do not drive them away and do not suppress them, until they fall away of themselves—not from resistance to them, but from the patience with which you bear them. Let them disturb and torment painfully, but at the same time they will be teaching you patient endurance of unpleasantnesses in general. Whoever tells you otherwise about this, suggesting that it is better to flee from such incidental distress, is counseling you to cut short the striving toward the virtue you are zealous to acquire.

It is true that a novice warrior, not yet experienced in battle, does better when he flees from disturbing circumstances, as though disdaining them, than when he exposes himself to their effect and resists them. However, even he should not always turn tail and retreat, but with full attentiveness and circumspection sometimes engage with what attacks him and sometimes pay no attention to it, depending on his progress in virtue and the moral strength acquired thereby. Only with regard to fleshly lust is such a policy inappropriate: in that case, flee—flee all situations that might arouse and inflame that passion—by reason of its unruliness and the cunning devices by which the enemy knows how to surround fleshly movements in order to incline one toward satisfying them.