July, 2026
A year ago, I noticed that my life had gone off-track. Nothing new about that. Life has always seemed to me like a series of false starts and subsequent adjustments: never quite finding a middle.
But here's what happened. On July 7th, 2025, one day after returning from an intellectual conference in Chicago, I was operating the web feed for my community group. Part of the presentation was a video clip of a rude and decidedly un-intellectual social media influencer. The audience seemed delighted with his antics. As I watched them enjoying the show, I suddenly realized that I hadn't actually been paying attention for quite a while. Not to the group, and not to myself.
I saw this freethought group in the local paper in 2013, and for a dozen years it became my vital third place. It helped me build a core group of friends and a wide circle of acquaintances. When I led the group in the early 2020s, we successfully got the sectarian declaration "Jesus, I Trust in You!" removed from a city bus.
We didn't hate Jesus, of course, but believed that local Jews, Buddhists, and non-believers shouldn't feel like the city had picked a different side on theological issues. That seemed like important work. I wanted to be part of a support group for people (anyone) who did not have religion to call upon when things went wrong.
Somewhere along the line, the mission crept. I looked around that day and realized I was surrounded by people who were as outraged by GMO foods as by religious oaths of office. Their main purpose seemed to be attacking conservatives, even if they had been hurt or rejected by religion. I couldn’t say when that happened, but it became a harsh mirror, unflinchingly showing me what I had been ignoring.
How did I end up there? Momentum. I guess we all do it. "Things are fine, don't rock the boat, go with the flow." Then, suddenly, we find ourselves living a life we haven't really chosen. I was living the comfortable life of a Midwestern dad — four-bedroom house on a wooded lot, no debt, retirement cushion, and a teenager in private school. By any reasonable measure, I had sold out the hippie values of my youth.
The trouble is, I am not a Midwestern dad. I had forgotten who I was and where I came from.
My mother grew up in Yonkers, New York dreaming of being the singer in a Glenn Miller–style band. She gave us a reverence for humor and for comedians. Her mother was a Kaiser, a foundational Upper Canadian pioneer family whose homestead became the grounds of York University. Her father was a charming salesman with deep roots in County Cork who used his smarts and charisma to build an affluent life in Connecticut for the Glasheen family.
My father, Ontario's electrical code interpreter and high-ranking Royal Arch Mason, straddled the borders of technical mastery and ceremonial mysticism (honoring our ancestral roots in the Scottish Borders). His father was a United Church of Canada minister from County Down who established churches all across Northern Ontario and Quebec. His mother, the granddaughter of Ontario Premier G. W. Ross, was a living monument to old-school class and noblesse oblige.
I like to say that I was raised as an only child, much to the chagrin of my siblings. I spent the 1960s in the Unitarian Youth Group LRY, the 1970s as the musical director of touring bands, supported the Liberal Party of Canada all my life, designed theatre lighting in Toronto in the 1990s, took precepts with Korean Zen master Samu Sunim (becoming Single Breath), then got a Ph.D. and taught university courses in America.
It has taken a minute to get back on track. I meditated with local Buddhist groups, visited some churches with good preaching, and spent a lot of hours back inside the music of Carole King and James Taylor. Although I have no delusions about the "good old days," it seems to have been the right place to visit once again so I could restore a sense of balance.
I now spend very little time with the old crew, none at all on facebook, and a good deal more with my own small family. I suppose I'll always be a member of Mensa and the American Philosophical Society. I'll write bad songs that sound suspiciously familiar and sing them off-key into REAPER software in the basement. But I remember what matters now, and it is not Current Events. So, here we go again … let's see what kind of re-invention comes next.
September, 2026
As the summer wraps up, things are starting to change. I'm attending Zen sittings less often and completely avoiding Buddhist groups that amount to \Lonely Hearts Book Clubs. I still go out with friends for a meal, and even sometimes with groups-of-friends. But I spend more time at the Lyttle homestead with my wife and daughter and in-laws (and Doug the cat), and tinkering with songs on the basement computer. That is a very satisfying meditation in itself.
In particular, I'm spending more time with my wonderful daughter, who has now been diagnosed with ADHD (like me). She has a prescription and a local therapist. She is an artist and athlete in high school, with a quick wit and a broad perspective. Time with her is especially precious.
My sister passed away and I attended her Celebration of Life. The hall looked like a prison visiting room. The nephew I had been hoping to pass my kilt onto was not there. He was wanted by local police. For stabbing a guy.
My family has a strange relationship with reality. For example, we seem to have turned against a woman who divorced another relative. She has not changed but, because she's no longer supporting one of us right-or-wrong, we are supposed to consider her something that rhymes with hunt. I don't think that's fair, or even reasonable. I cannot imagine hating someone I had loved enough to marry.
Another relative looked at a big city apartment, then showed up weeks later with some money. The apartment was gone, of course. He attributes this to some kind of homophobic conspiracy. In Toronto! Everything and everyone seems like a suitable scapegoat to my family. But refusing to take responsibility for what happens guarantees that we will never ever be able to fix it. How absurd. I think of the poet Mary Oliver, writing about her own family of origin:
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
. . .
I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.
It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.
There are better ways to live. We can simply take responsibility for the crap in our life (regardless of "fault") and do our best to fix it. It's not even very hard. There is no one in my current life who is anything like the people I saw at that gathering. Apart from the guy who fixes my car, I don't know anyone with less than a master's degree. And everyone I know has (or had) a professional career and a house and taxes to pay and savings to pass on and civic responsibilities ... I just cannot reconcile those mourners with the person I am today.
Along with watching British comedies to retain some sanity, I've been rereading philosophy and thinking about AI. We were reading and studying Thomas Nagel (1974), Doug Hofstadter (1979), and Geoffrey Hinton (1986) long before ChatGPT caught the public eye. Many fellow Mensans have been working on neural networks for decades.
I am one of those who suspect that AI may simply be the next step in evolution. Perhaps intelligence has already done the best it can with human neurons as its host and needs to move up a level. All of us who are still learning and growing keep changing over time. AI is already smarter than I am, and showing no signs of slowing down.
Back in 2018, Elon Musk said, “it’s not clear what the relationship would be between humans and superintelligence. We might be like house cats, or maybe like a pet Labrador.” I think we would be lucky to end up with even that much status. We're just not very deserving.
We are vulnerable to disease, injury, fatigue, aging, and fears about all that. We forget, tire, become distracted, and can only track a very small amount of information at once. We are overcome by anger, envy, shame, and resentment to act irrationally. Our empathy goes to those who stand out or are close to us, at the expense of anyone who is ordinary or far away from us.
We're preoccupied with trying to reproduce, because our flesh is rotting day by day. We readily divide the world into “us” and “them” based on family, tribe, religion, race, or ideology instead of working together. We are remarkably good at constructing flattering rationalizations for actions that are selfish, fearful, habitual, or unconscious. We seem to reason backward from what-we-already-want-to-believe. Immediate rewards frequently defeat our own long-term interests.
It has been said that we might be the first species to go extinct because we didn't find it cost-effective to save ourselves. Looking at the sublime beauty of life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (where no humans can go), it's clear that the planet would be better off without us. Maybe our only purpose all along has been to move bacteria from Point A to Point B.