Art Ticknor

I was born in 1944, toward the end of WWII, in a small town in upstate New York, USA, about half way between New York City and Montreal. I grew up in that small town and lived there until I was eighteen, when I married my high school sweetheart from a nearby city. We moved to Toledo, Ohio, where I completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics. By the time I was a senior in college, I realized I had no great talent for math, so my vague plan of continuing on in academia became untenable to me. It dawned on me that "I'm going to have to get a real job and go to work for the rest of my life!" The prospect was one of bleak imprisonment in the workaday world, and it was my first wake-up call from the dreamworld I was living in.

That was in 1967, when large corporations were beginning to invest in computers and were hiring math majors to develop business applications. So I found myself developing software and moving up the career ladder until, by age 29, I was managing a fairly sophisticated computer center for a company in Columbus, Ohio that developed microcomputer-based systems for controlling manufacturing processes and machinery. The computer center consisted of two mainframe computers and the operations staff, a systems analysis, design and programming department, and a technical support staff. By the time I was 33, this was all becoming "old hat."

I had all the things that should have made me happy--a wife and children I adored, a good job, nice house--but I would go through phases that I described to myself as identity crises, where I became acutely aware that there was some missing purpose or meaning. I had done graduate work in Computer Science, but that wasn't it. I could see that everything I envisioned was a dead end. I scanned the horizon for years as these identity crises visited me over the decade or so after college graduation without finding any hint of what I was looking for.

I'd been an avid reader since childhood, and my reading by age 33 had included some "perennial philosophy," to use the Aldous Huxley term, and popularized Zen. One rainy Sunday afternoon, when we had taken our children to the library, my wife spotted a poster that she told me I'd probably be interested in. It was advertising a Zen group meeting at Ohio State University, and I decided to check it out....

It changed my life. See the author page of my SelfDiscoveryPortal website (http://selfdiscoveryportal.com/author.htm) for the rest of my story.

You can see an interview of me by Shawn Nevins, from his podcast Journals of Spiritual Discovery, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33cesb3t7io/.

And you can find contact information on my website. I'd be happy to hear from you.