Take a hike !!!

Did you ever tell someone to "take a hike"?  I certainly have.  It was right at my front door.  A couple of rather insistent peddlers came to the front door and seemed bound and determined to not hear my repeated "we're not interested" so finally I just had to tell them to "take a hike" and closed the door in their faces.  Not particularly nice, but it worked.

I remember another time maybe 10 years ago now when I basically said the same thing.  To my daughter !  She was in college at the time, and she had a pretty full plate.  It was finals time to boot, and that is what was doing her in at this moment of time.  Out of the blue I got what many parents will recognize as the "panicking, crying, overwhelmed child call".   This is when they are really worked up.  You struggle, but you manage to make sense of what they are saying through uncontrollable sobbing with a mix of wailing, and perhaps even a few "you don't understands" thrown in.  Really, it's nasty to get one of those calls at 10:30 at night when you're 50 miles away.  When I finally was able to get my two cents in to answer the question that had been sobbed to me any number of times already during that call..."oh dad, what am I going to do?" the dumbest thing I ever heard popped into my head.  I told her to drop what she was doing, right now, and run....RUN...up and down the stairs to the main floor four to five times..RIGHT NOW.. and then call me back when she was done.  I have to mention here, that she lived on the 5th floor.

When she called back after that version of "take a hike" she was remarkably calm.  The first thing she did was thank me, and then she went on to just chat about how clear headed and revitalized she felt after running up and down the stairs.  She went on to study well that night, focused, and relaxed.  And, she passed her finals in good shape.

We all get clutzed up by the stuff in our lives that comes our way.  If we allow it to, and we often do, we let it fester and boil, and before long we can easily turn into a mess like my daughter did in the example.  We, and all the little figments that reside in our head, can just plain get unnecessarily worked up.  My daughter called her father.  When stuff like this happens to us, when we and our figments collide to the point that we get all clutzed up, we often forget to bring the "Big Guy", our Father, into the equation.  He might just tell us to "take a hike".....literally.  I know there have been times in my life when that short walk around the block, or even just a walk with the dog, has been the stage whereupon my mind was cleared of some of the mess it was dancing with at the time.

I'm pretty convinced that a good portion of my good thinking comes from when I "take a hike".....even when it's the dog taking me on that walk.  Do you need to "take a hike" more often to get rid of the crap in your life?