The Future of Radio Bebop

Hey everyone,

Quick update here on life and where Radio Bebop is headed next. I’ve absolutely loved writing this every morning (or early afternoon) for the last 4 months or so and I’m very much excited to keep this going. It’s been an incredibly helpful ritual for me and I’m grateful that each and every one of you has been tuning in along the way.

I expressed at the beginning that part of purpose of this for me was to figure out more about who I am now and what I love to do, and my time so far here has delivered on that in spades. I never really cared about daily journaling in a notebook or something similar because it felt sort of sterile to me, but the newsletter format has ended up filling a similar function while helping me connect more closely with you folks, some of whom I knew before starting this and some of whom I didn’t. It also helped me clear through some of the sadness I apparently still had around the old newsletter I used to write and missed in many different ways since I stopped.

And the clarity it’s given me has, as all clarity tends to do, pushed me to move into the next chapter of my life and myself, both of which have taken shape much more quickly even than I expected. Or maybe it’s like the old C.S. Lewis quote about how funny it is that day to day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different. Even just the last 4 months feel that way to me, and it’s quickly become obvious to me that I need to give much more of my time and energy to what’s ahead.

I’m not intending to be cryptic here, I’m just more aware now of the ways in which our strengths and weaknesses are the same thing. One of my gifts is being able to sense or see things that haven’t happened yet, or could happen if someone wanted them to, and in the past that’s led me to talking about those things as if they already existed rather than moving and acting on them. For many years I felt a lot of shame around being the “ideas guy” in the room, and I often unplugged from situations where I should have pushed and/or fought for myself more but chose instead to disconnect. Which I mention only to say that I’m really excited about what I’m working on next but it’s not really time to talk about any of it quite yet.

In the meantime, I’m going to need to free up the time I’ve been spending on this every morning which means I’ll be doing these less frequently. For now, I’m going to commit to once a week on Friday mornings, and I expect that the content will be the same as it has been so far. Some combination of personal reflection and digested paraphernalia at the expense of simple expression and orderly overview. I like how messy and incomplete the human experience is, and I feel most comfortable when I’m producing something that pulls me or anyone else into the beauty of that rather than pretending that isn’t the case. That might be why a library is the perfect structure for me in many ways. It has a logic and a cohesion but still requires someone pushing a cart around with an outrage of unrelated books to keep it up to date.

There’s a great deal more here, just not at this cadence, and whether you decide to keep following along or unsubscribe I wanted to make sure to pause and thank you for the time you’ve spent reading and responding. It’s going to be a fun 50 years or so, and I’m excited we get to hang out here along the way.

Best,

Tyler