The rain was relentless, but under the canvas you find 10 year Dan nose deep in the novelisation of Tim Burton’s Batman by torch light.
This was as close as I could get to the movie and I’d have to wait another few years until it aired on the BBC one Christmas.
That holiday was a literal washout, and when our tent flooded my parents needed to figure out what to do with four kids in the middle of France. For them, it was probably a source of tension, hushed arguments, and frustrated looks.
For me, it was a great adventure.
As a family, we’d go camping most years, but this is the story we keep telling each other. The hilarious imperfection of it all has turned a trip no one wanted to remember into family canon that we could never forget.
Nobody chooses the rain. We haven’t chosen it since.
And we wouldn’t change a thing.
Creator in superposition
When I sit down at my desk in the morning, I am not one person. I am a hundred.
The author who wants to write. The entrepreneur who wants to pitch. The marketer with a post to craft. Each holding a different part of the story, convinced that if I notice them, we’ll finally collapse into the direction we need.
Every version of me exists at the same time, occupying the same moment. Every creative path feels equally promising and full of danger, because to choose one is to risk choosing wrong.
With a hundred different places to start, the last thing I need is the right plan. After all, there isn’t one that will survive contact with the work. I need something to reach me first: a problem to solve, a person to serve, a reader waiting for a reply.
Some rain to respond to.
Without that external contact, the different versions of me will continue to lobby for their version of what we need. Without friction, the answer each holds is just as valid as the next. Without someone or something beyond the desk, there is no heading that leads me away from more guesswork.
The different versions of me that sit at this desk need a mission to serve and a reason to fall in line. Otherwise I’ll just continue my voyage as the lonely practitioner, behind a lonely screen, circling the next version of a lonely story that I hope will get me noticed.
And noticed for what? My wisdom? My expertise? Without someone or something to serve, what I have to say might not be worth hearing. I’m certainly not saying anything that hasn’t been said before.
Our work only matters where it meets someone, where another set of eyes help us understand the bigger picture as we recognise each other in our sodden stories.
The meaning you crave is on the other side of the flood.
The only way forward? Is through.
Meet your maker
Imagine me reading that Batman novel minus the Joker. It would have been a very short and boring book.
It’s the friction that made the story worth reading.
And it’s what makes yours worth hearing.
The redundancy you didn’t expect, the break-up that cast you adrift, or the idea born from someone else’s problem instead of your planning session.
When I sit down to work, the Author, the Entrepreneur and the Marketer try to take charge. They are my protectors, and boy, do I love them. Always ready to bury the unpredictable contact my practice actually needs with something confident to say. They offer the security of immediate direction with ways to feel productive for hours and days on end.
But I don’t want to be distracted, I want to serve. And to serve I need to receive.
To do that, I need to remember who I am. The Narrator, trying to make sense of the story so far. The Midwife ready to receive what wants to happen to me, through me, and for me. The Friend with a table worth sitting at, and a seat to offer.
All of them are cut off without contact.
It’s the people I meet who make the difference. Where a theory becomes a practice. Where an idea finally finds out why it was thought. Where the rubble of your past suddenly has a new reason to exist.
Where you stop perfecting the plan and start dancing in the rain.
The Author, the Entrepreneur, and the Marketer are great partners to me. I cannot serve the work without them. But they cannot meaningfully create without the Narrator, the Midwife, and the Friend. They need the friction that the others carry.
Contact with the work animates them, and drenches the work you serve with meaning. The Friend notices the common ground with someone in pain. The Midwife receives the questions we’re too afraid to ask. The Narrator discovers how the fragments form the mosaic.
The next chapter isn’t written by what you want. It’s written by what you find.
A room full of questions
There’s one person you’ll find at my desk who is instinctively ready to respond: the Dad with Duplo to master.
My son is a painfully wonderful example of what contact can do. When I feel the pressure of a hundred different things, he’s the rain, and I am the response.
Being an uncle to 11 nephews and nieces taught me almost nothing about parenting save for one thing: it’s not going to go to plan.
We did what we could to prepare, but how do you prepare for something you’ve never done before? We read books, we discussed lots of things, we bought all the stuff, but what we really needed was perspective.
So we joined a group of other on-edge parents-to-be, and a doula. A room full of people who held the questions we hadn’t thought of and a guide who’d seen it all. She didn’t give us a guidebook or a template to follow because no solution could withstand what was about to happen to us, through us, and for us. But she could help us step back far enough so we could see the terrain.
There were questions about feeding schedules, how to manage family challenges, medical realities that carried real fear. The doula held every question without flinching, without fixing, and with enough experience to say: plan for what you hope for, and create room for what actually happens.
We didn’t need more information. We needed friends who could hold the awe and terror with us, and the presence of a guide in the uncertainty.
Contact.
It illuminated what we could not see, revealed the questions we had not thought, and broadened the vista of what being a parent might look like.
The story of a young life, with many authors etched into the acknowledgements.
Already in it
A few years ago, my wife and I travelled to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Like camping in France, this trip did not go to plan. Sadly, not enough years have passed yet for it to be funny.
One afternoon we made our way to the coast and I could see a lighthouse up ahead. I was ready to be adventurous. My wife was not.
She said, “You can’t see the view when you’re in the view.”
It’s the laziest and wisest thing she has ever said.
I wanted to climb to the top, to see further, to capture something worthy of the highlights reel. She wanted to stay exactly where we were because we were already standing in something remarkable.
Of course, she was right. The lighthouse wasn’t the view. We were already in it.
And you are too.
Standing on the surface of planet you, too close to feel the magnitude of what is shifting around you.
In isolation, you are a bottleneck for what wants to happen. Confusing the noise of not-yet-visible progress with the silence of nothing happening. Looking at the gap between where you are and where you imagined you would be, reading it as failure.
But you are so much more than the moment you are in.
Right now, your Majesty remains unmoved and the perspective you cannot see does not reduce who you are. The question of who you are here to serve is not redacted by how you feel about yourself.
The question is whether you’ll stay on the shore or wade in. Because only one of those changes you.
From the edge you can say “I understand you” and mean it. But when you wade in, stand where they stand, you discover you can say “I am changed by you” and know it.
The shore is teeming with authors, entrepreneurs, and marketers. Some are barking coaching tips on how to swim, others are throwing floats, the rest are sitting at their laptops creating a brilliant hook for a social post.
But empathy asks: who are you going to respond to? Only then will you put down the plan and sprint into the water like their life depended on it.
It’s what this Movement has been building toward.
You’ve named the isolation you’re carrying and stopped performing your way through it. You’ve forgiven what you couldn’t fix and danced with what remained. You’re holding your mosaic without apology and meeting another person’s complexity without flinching. You’re learning to say “you’re here” instead of “I’m here.”
Not because it’s good for you, even though it is. But because your calling, owned and lived, is good for everyone.
In the future, they probably won’t know your name. But you’ve begun a life’s work of helping others take a step back, look up, and experience the view that was in front of them the whole time.
And like me, huddled over an objectively bad book under stormy French skies, you’ll know that it wasn’t the plan that made the trip worth it.
It was the contact with the rain.
A song to close Movement 2: Empathy
The space that connects me where I am now
To the place where I’ll one day be
It’s measured in the words that we speak
And the strange and wondrous things I’ve seen
It’s measured in truth, it’s measured in love
Measured in a tendency to pain
It’s measured by a girl in a field of flowers
Screaming, “Dream of a midnight train”
This has been going on for years
Years and years and years and years
And years and years and years and years
I can’t begin to tell you how that feels
An invitation
If you’re already in the work, building with intention, and hard work doesn’t scare you - I’d love to have a conversation.
The Order of Unremarkable Creators exists to offer the fellowship, friction, and context many artists, creators, and solo-operators are missing.
It’s not something you can simply join, and membership is currently capped at 20 members (this is not a tactic, it’s about foundations before growth).
If you’re curious to know more, or if this stanza has raised questions for you, please reach out to me on dan@unremarkable.co.
Where We Are:
This is Week 24 of a year-long practice.
Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.
You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View ← You are here
Next we explore Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring contact and how to bring our practice to life in the world.
Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.