Today is July 17 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you remind yourself that hope begins in the dark?
Successful people who navigate the chaos like director and writer Barry Jenkins understand that hope begins in the dark and believe the dawn will come.
Jenkins was born in 1979 in Liberty City, Miami, and has three older siblings. His father died when he was 12, and had earlier separated from his mother, believing that Jenkins was not his biological son. During his childhood, Jenkins was raised by another woman in an overcrowded apartment. Jenkins played high school football and then studied film at Florida State University.
Jenkins's breakout film was Medicine for Melancholy, a low-budget independent feature released in 2008.
After the success of his previous film, Jenkins wrote an epic for Focus Features about “Stevie Wonder and time travel” and an adaptation to the James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which never entered production.
He later worked as a carpenter and co-founded an advertising company called Strike Anywhere.
In 2011, he wrote and directed Remigration, a sci-fi short film about gentrification.
Jenkins directed, and co-wrote with Tarell Alvin McCraney, the 2016 drama Moonlight, his first feature film in eight years. The film was shot in Miami and premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2016 to vast critical acclaim and awards buzz.
A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote: "Moonlight dwells on the dignity, beauty and terrible vulnerability of black bodies, on the existential and physical matter of black lives." The film won dozens of accolades, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture – Drama and the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards.
Author Anne Lamott wrote “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”
Throughout his childhood and then the 8 long years between his first film and Moonlight, Jenkins believed that dawn will come and never gave up.” Do you?