One of the Fathers told a story of a certain elder who was in his cell busily at work and wearing a hair shirt when Abba Ammonas came to him. When Abba Ammonas saw him wearing a hair shirt he said: That thing won’t do you a bit of good. The elder said: Three thoughts are troubling me. The first impels me to withdraw somewhere into the wilderness. The second, to seek a foreign land where no one knows me. The third, to wall myself into this cell and see no one and eat only every second day.
Abba Ammonas said to him: None of these will do you a bit of good. But rather sit in your cell, and eat a little every day, and have always in your heart the words which are read in the Gospel and were said by the Publican, and thus you can be saved.
