Essential stuff, nice run, perhaps even a rut of tradition

Eight Miles...................a fine Saturday morning it was indeed. I took these pictures as I ran East to the mountains. Halfway through the eight mile run I was at the corner of Tramway and Tennyson and at that point I was my closest to the mountain. I remembered one of my favorite Tennyson Poems upon noticing the street sign:

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with cooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands,

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The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

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The Southwest is certainly an "azure world", close to the sun in the high desert, close to mountain walls. It was indeed a perfect morning. Had not even considered pondering anything business related. Why ponder big business vs's small or corporate vs's private on a Saturday run. Not that I haven't but "why" is still a good comment. That said, I was interrupted. .................This was my, as Thoreau would put it, my weeks "trip to the woods

I went to the woods, because I wished to live deliberately,

to front only the essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived.

Yes indeed a van drove by. It was a silver van with a business name on the side. The van had was clean and had been polished. It stopped and a young man inside rolled down the window. He was a young man but he had a younger teenage brother sitting beside him. They were looking for a street. His business, "Complete Mobile Detail, had a customer nearby he needed to find. I told him what he needed to know. He then said, "wait, let me give you my business card, you might need some detail work on your cars?" The card has a picture of a custom 40's era ford on it. It has full moon hubcaps. It is lowered with a custom grill. Under the car it says, "we bring our service to you". Nice young man. Some passion about his business. The key to sales passion is to care. He cared. Probably an entrepreneur. So there you go. My effort to confront the essential facts of life lead me to run towards the mountains but then business found me.

O Well

By the way Thoreau said some good stuff:

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

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The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!