You know the Norman Vincent Peale quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”?

I saw Gravity. Nobody wants that.

I jest, but looking back at some of the bigger efforts of my life… I’ve missed many moons. I’ve worked hard, tried the best I knew how, and failed. And if not complete failure, then at least I didn’t have my expectations properly calibrated and it felt pretty close to complete failure.

Yes, one of my all time heroes has said,
“Far better is it to dare mighty things,
to win glorious triumphs,
even though checkered by failure…
than to rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy nor suffer much,
because they live in a gray twilight
that knows not victory nor defeat.”

But a guy could hope for a glorious triumph now and again once, right T.R.?

Two things.Thinking you can reach the moon isn’t always bad (even if you can’t).
When I set out to make a movie on my own time, I had naively allowed myself to believe that I could finish it quickly, make a profit, and turn around and do it again the next year.

Obviously, this didn’t happen.

But, I learned way more than if I had taken an objective look and said to myself, “You’re probably not going to see this getting picked up by a major film festival, then have a bidding war over it from distributors, and someday talk about your first films with Christopher Nolan.”

If I had thought the effort was impossible, I may never have started. If I never had started, I wouldn’t have learned what I needed when the opportunity for a directing job in Nashville became available.

Sometimes the moon is a Death Star.
A part of me wonders what would have happened if everything had gone according to how I had planned. If I had somehow become wildly successful and never left Tulsa… my daughter(s) wouldn’t have been born.

Granted, I think too much about cause and effect in a time travel sense, but I also look at what I’ve learned from parenting. There are some things that my child really, really wants, but it would wreck her if I allowed it.

Sometimes I wonder what God kept me from by allowing circumstances to cause the film to drag out so long that moving away for work was a necessity. I wonder if I would have let a success get to my head. I wonder if what my children will accomplish someday will be greater than anything I could ever have managed, and them existing meant things not lining up the way I had hoped on one endeavor.

I don’t know. I don’t get to see the big picture. But I trust the one who does, and right now He has blessed my family with so much that it heavily outweighs the frustrations I have that things took far longer than I had hoped to finish what is the largest endeavor I have ever undertaken.

For that I am grateful.

It was a proud parenting moment to correct my daughter when she saw this and said, “Moon!”

vcD,
-R

P.S. In other moon-missing news, I recently lost a weight loss contest even though I dropped 18 pounds in 5 weeks. I was super-close to crossing the finish line first, then my body screamed ‘PLATEAU’ just before I could win.

I’m still working towards the consolation prize (which was graciously offered), but I’d like to think that yet another loss means that this effort toward health means I might get to spend more time with my family in the long run.

P.P.S. I don’t consider Greyscale a failure, and I don’t chalk up its timeline due to a lack of quality in the film. If anything, it was the long learning curve that comes with trying to scale a mountain of that size and shutting my ears to anyone who would say “Just put it out,” and instead trying to make it as perfect as possible when I can (which is another topic that deserves its own blog post as to why I held this mindset).

I’m hoping to release it soon, and I’m excited to see it across the finish line and into the hands of others.