Self respect.

Probably fish.
Flounder and eels for many years, but more recently all of those species that people value - snapper, blue cod, trevally, crayfish, paua (abalone), hoki, hake, roughy, dories, hapuku (groper), ....

I was a fisherman, and now design computer systems to assist in the business and management of fisheries.

It has been a very interesting process, more a study in humanity than a study of nature.   It seems natural systems still defy mans attemps at giving lip service to management of wild fisheries.  I think we do better here in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world, and we are still a long way from perfect.   Still too much greed, and too many simplistic economic models, and too much bureaucratic Arse covering to be effective in responding to natural systems - and we are learning, however glacially slow that process may be.

Grey
Mostly white - containing all the colors of the spectrum, with just a touch of darkness - to round out my humanity.

My first name is Thomas, and it comes from an uncle that my Dad was working with/for around the time of my birth, and mysecond name comes from my mother's grandfather - Edward.

When I was a few weeks old my Dad and Tom had a falling out - so I got called Ted - and it stuck.  Ted I am.

Thomas seems to derive from Twin.
Edward from Ead Happy or Prosperous and Weard - Guardian.

Howard seems to derive from one of several germanic meanings, which range from Brave Heart to High Chief to Hall Warden.

For me - I tend to Identify with both Doubting Thomas, and Thomas Covenant  (Ring Thane, unbeliever and white gold weilder).

Genetically, my Great grandfather William Henry Howard landed in Auckland NZ from London England on the Diharee in 1876.

I see a lot of relationships, and see it as relationships betwee three separate entities rather than just two.
The body provides the brain (hardware) and all sensory systems, and the emotional/chemical systems, that link us in so many subtle and profound ways to reality.
One of the mechanisms that body provides us is the mechanism of intuition - the way our brains distill pattern at many levels from sense data and memory.

The second level of the relationship is the "Culture mind", that part of our mind which learned language and behaviours before it created the third part of us, that part of mind that learned about itself (the self awareness).

Each of these three entities, body, "culture mind" and awareness, are intimately linked in too many ways to detail here.  Elsewhere in this blog I have gone into some detail on some aspects.

It seems we are each of us capable of infinite creativity, each potentially entirely unpredictable, each capable of love.

Time to update some of our systems methinks.

Time to expose the matrix for what it really is.

Learning new stuff - reading about strange and foreign things and possibilities.  Finding out how things work.  Getting the right asnwers in things like maths and science. Having friends, when I did eventually make some.

Service works.
Love works.
Injustice really gets me going.
What really gets me fired is some self rightious bigot telling me it can't be done - then I do it just to prove a point.  Works best when what I want to do is of service to others, done in a spirit of love, and solves some injustice ;)

It's late evening here in NZ, so it is hard to remember.  I was staying at my sister's place in Christchurch, in a nephew's room, with the dogs in the hall outside my room.  So several times I woke tot he sound of dogs chasing up and down the hall, and wished they would stop - which the eventually did and I returned to sleep.

Often the thoughts fleeting through consciousness at the first waking relate in part to whatever I was dreaming about, and in part to whatever I am contemplating at the time (usually several unanswered questions sitting in active storage at any point in time).

Sometimes these emphemeral thoughts prove valuable and inciteful, and often not - usually worth checking out when they occur.

I don't think there is anything wrong with fear.
Fear is a healthy response to potentially dangerous situations.

What counts is what we do when we have fear.

If we use the fear as a tool to focus our attention, and then we do what the situation demands of us (feel the fear and do it anyway), then we have used fear powerfully.

If we allow ourselves to be stopped by fear then we have not acted powerfully.

Fear is just another indicator, like joy, or tiredness, elation.

One of my backup hard drives - about 1TB of images videos, text files, etc, from my first computer in 1980 until now, with picyures going back to my birth in 1955, and prior to my parents, grandparents and great grandparents.

In my dreams I live in the future, in reality the eternal now.

In my dream future, my body is eternally 26 years old.  I have the tools and security to investigate and explore anything I choose.  I have friends and family to share the journey.
All humanity live in peace.
All the old problems, famine, war, pestilence, ...; are solved.  Now we have new problems - much more interesting.

Of course it is possible to create a world that works for humanity and non-human ecosystems.
We are infinitely creative beings - each and every one of us.
We can, in this sense "save the world".

Question is - will we?

I say yes.
I stand for yes.
I am working for that, and have been for 40 years.
Anyone else is welcome to join me.
We are not alone.
We can make it happen.

What is most neat about numbers is how easy it is to get a feel for the difference between the real and the infinite.

As human beings we may be infinitely creative, yet we cannot create everything.

If you take infinity as an idea.  Imagine the infinity of real numbers, doesn't matter how big a number you think of, you can always think of one bigger.
This is one infinity.

Then think about the gap between any two numbers.  You can fill it with fractions. If you start with 1/2, then 2/3 then 3/4 each time taking the last bottom number of the fraction to the top, and putting a new number one bigger on the bottom, you can go on forever.

There is such an infinity of fractions between every number.   This infinity of all possible fractions is obviously a bigger infinity than the infinity of whole numbers alone.

Now shift thinking to real world.   It is much smaller, though vast.
If you think about time, we think in seconds, 60 per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year - they multiply out to 31,536,000 seconds in a year.

Reality seems to deal with time in smaller chunks.  The smallest size chunk that appears measurable to us at this point is the Planck time ( about 5 x 10^-44 of a second).
In space we have a unit called the Planck length (about 10^-35m).

If you do the sums on the known age of the universe, the inflation rate, giving a volume over time, and measure everything in Planck units, then you get a number that is roughly 10^220 (a 1 with 220 zeros after it).
Now that is a truely collosal number - all of the measurable reality that has existed in our universe, yet you or I could write it on a piece of paper in a minute or so.

This is what it looks like:
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000

That number is big enough to include all the possibility of our universe in physical space and time - to date.

Yet the human mind is capable of vastly greater complexity of thought.

What are you going to create?

Welcome to the rabbit hole!

I'm told that at about age 1, on our first family holiday to Taupo, I got out of the car, ran straight across the road and into the lake, and was still running underwater when my dad reached underwater and dragged me to the surface.

As long as I can remember I have loved the water, loved being under water.

Exactly one year ago I was 400 miles away from home on a business trip, and my wife had just told me that she was thinking of leaving me.

I was in deep turmoil.
The next day I had planned to meet with someone who had the potential to significantly progress the project to to end hunger and warfare for humanity.

In the event, I chose family over humanity, and travelled back home ahead of schedule.

The path has been far from even, and I am more in love with my wife now than I was then,  We are together, deeply in love, and I feel far more able to complete my chosen mission, because I have greater empathy and understanding, and a little less arrogance.

Do what must be done.
Be patient.

Ask questions.
Check out the "what is so"ness of being for yourself.
Trust your own intuitions, at least enough to check them in reality.
Don't be afraid to stand up to the crowd.
Be compassionate.
Love the furthest - and do what is required in reality to make that love effective.
Be prepared to sacrifice what you can for others, but don't try to force or expect others to do likewise.
Lead by example.
Be at peace.
Love the journey.
Appreciate all that you have, and be thankful for it, whatever it is.
Approach life with a childlike sense of awe and wonder.
Follow your bliss - with all the discipline you can muster - whereever it leads.

I am a child of the infinite - infinite in my potential - achingly finite in my present being.

Questing, thinking, contemplative, loving, empathic, creative, destructive, free, patterned, ....

A human being, like all of us, like and unlike every other human being.

Built of so many layers of energies and patterns, with more layer being added and existing layer expanded.

Aware, awake, commited, in love - and not, from time to time.

Here in Kaikoura we have the first real Southerly gale of the aproaching winter.  It is cold, and we are thinking about the storms of winter to come,

Even in these conditions, and I suspect at all times, there are new things blooming.  New possibilities for contribution.  A training weekend for Lions coming up.  A young canadian exchange student with us for a few days - took him out for his first trip ocean fishing today - saw seals, terns, albatrosses, gannets, shags, shearwaters, gulls.  He caught a couple of Baracouta, and 4 perch, and got to see some baracouta striking.  So that is something new, and perhaps growing.

By trusting.
By accepting that we all make errors.
By the old addage - never ascribe to intention that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
By having a loving family around me, & great friends.
By stretching my "comfort zone" on a regular basis.
By being clear about all the mistakes I have made in life - makes it rather difficult to get too precious with anyone else about anything else.
By spending a lot of time in nature, eyes open, senses alert - in awe and wonder.

So many possible perspectives on this one.
If you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, he gives many examples of how our brains reach almost instantaneous decisions with no conscious involvement.  He doesn't say anything about the how.
The how is fascinating, and seems to derive from the way in which we store and retrieve information as interference patterns, rather than as sequential patterns like computers do.
Looking within allows us greater conscious access to this amazing power of intuition.
To many this power seems so distinct from themselves, that they ascribe it to some other force, some form of "god" or "universal spirit".
The truth seems to be much stranger.

It seems that evolution has stumbled across a mechanism that connects us to all of reality, and all of possibility space, and squeezed it into the cranium of a naked ape.

Funny how things work out.

Looking within, we can become connected to all that is, and all that might possibly be, at the most profound and beautiful and personal level.

One gets to simultaneously experience being almost infinitely small, and almost infinitely large.

So many contradictions.
So much beauty.
So much love.
So much possibility.
So much creativity.

Be a great life !

To use my judgement in the making of my own choices, and to suspend judgement of the choices of others.
To laugh and love a lot.
To enjoy all that life throws at me, and to look for the benefit.
To love.
To explore.
That the truth of science is often far stranger and more beautiful than the myths of culture (if somewhat more demanding on the brain).
That every individual has the infinite capacity to surprise and delight me.

Seems to me that there are many answers to that question, some almost universal, some intensely personal.
Abraham Maslow does a good equiry into the levels of need.
It seems that evolution gives us all a basic set of needs for food, shelter, security, and then a set of more complex needs, for belonging to a group, for acceptance, to love and be loved, to gain and exercise power.
The journey of discovery of what we really want can often be long.
Joni Mitchel captured it quite nicely "sometimes you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone - they paved paradise and put up a parking lot".
I think that if we are given a chance, we can all feel a connection to living systems, but many in cities do not get that chance; so never know what they're missing.

At the start of our live we want to be right, which often we achieve by making others wrong.  

Those who manage to grow past right/wrong (good/evil to quote Nietzche) still often find that most of us want to be noticed, to make a difference at some level.
It is not as easy as many imagine to go beyond right & wrong, what most of us achieve on our first few attempts is a sort of arrogance that fails to appreciate that there an infinite number of workable paths to any destination, and just because someone is going the oposite way to you in the instant, doesn't mean that ultimate we aren't all heading to the same goal.

Just finished taking minutes for a meeting of the Kaikorua branch of Forest & Bird Protection Society - about to have a cup of green tea.

I think there is a confusion in the question.
I do not believe that one can always rely on anything.
I do believe that one can trust, knowing that that trust will not always be fulfilled.

Thus I trust many and often, and usually that trust is fulfilled.

I guess what I trust most is that aspect of human nature that in most of us really does want to make a difference in our communities.

That has to be one of the weirdest wuestions yet.

About 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999+% of all reality.
The vast bulk of what everyone else thinks.
Most of my own internal patterns.
Almost infinitely more than what I am aware of!

My attachment to right.
Now I seem to be able to maintain a state (perhaps a stage) where I can love the being in the instant of it, without much attachment to whats has been said and done previously.
I can't take much credit for it either, I sort of got myself into a situation where it was this or lose everything I valued.
It takes some intentionality, and it is possible.
Has some great rewards.

Very hazy impressions of balance - walking (about 10 months - not sure if it is real, or implanted by subsequent conversations - particularly with mum).

Do my best to have it all.
Get as much as I can from life, and give as much as I can to life.
Enjoy my relationships, with my wife, children, family, friends, community, clients, networks, anyone I meet.
Read, study, experience, contemplate, try out, play around.
A bit of computer programming and consultancy to bring in enough money to keep doing all the other stuff.
A lot of work on self, trying to figure out what it is that actually drives me, rather than the excuses and rationalisations that I normally let myself get away with.
Seeking to find my Bliss.
Generally having a good time (with a few of the other thrown in for balance and appreciation).