Last night was one of those Pacific Ocean sunsets that make you think a lot about life.  Bright orange that brings out colors in the coastal areas and mountains that draws you into a near trance.  You cannot possibly walk away from the spectrum of light, and the spectrum of inner peace you travel through during that 15 minute period of sunset till dusk.

Back to reality.  We live in a world of Internet, MP3 players, telephones that think they are MP3 players, freeway systems, global economies, containers, refineries, Vegas, war, poverty, and opulence that either thrills or disgusts - depending on your point of view.

But the sunset, that is also reality.  It has seduced beach goers and horizon viewers for thousands of years, and still is able to put us into a surreal trance without interference from the latest techno gadget or global crisis.  Add a couple of circling seagulls, a pod of dolphins jumping on the glimmering copper colored ocean, and maybe even a sailboat off on the horizon, and even the toughest person will take a pause.

My life is technology.  I dream about designing great networks, implementing new technologies, and designing creative disruption and chaos into existing human and technical systems.  But I also find myself rushing home at night to catch one more perfect sunset.  Designing a cloud server to connect to public Internet exchange points is pretty cool.  Bringing port pricing on 10GE switch ports down from $15,000/month to $400/month is a lot of fun, and really, really disruptive to some legacy markets. 

But nothing in recent years has come close to a sunset walk on the beach, with the water on my toes, a warm breeze in the air, and an explosion of colors that cannot be captured on film or paintings.  That brings life back to reality, reality back to life, and gives a reason for doing everything else we aggressively do in our lives.