An exercise in creativity

Inside peak at Tribal Quillkeepers writing course

Tribal Training founder and head coach

Ryan Dreyer

launched a new writing program inside the team and open to anyone on the outside looking to leverage the written word for personal growth and development.

He’s led the first cohort through an exciting first few weeks of instruction that’s gotten everyone high on creative juices and primed to make a big impact on the world through their enhanced writing skills and frameworks.

All of us were challenged to publish one of our writing experiments, and while I will do that below it’s important to say a quick word on why all of this matters to an endurance training team.

When I say the ‘truth is in the training’ I mean it in so many deep ways.

• There’s the objective truth of our individual sessions.

• There’s the subjective truth of our self discovery.

• There’s the undeniable truth of our process played out in action over years.

• There’s the spiritual truth of learning to trust faith to guide you through adversity.

A lot of the meaning in that phrase has to do with making the implicit explicit. In philosophy, there’s an idea that exists that nothing is truly real until it’s named properly. What’s inherent in the object, thing, or concept, becomes knowable through an explicit naming process.

Our team is built on the idea that endurance helps up first know ourselves truthfully through righteous struggle but that we can then take those lessons from training into the rest of our lives for meaningful impact. The truth is in the training afterall.

So a course on writing, bringing what’s authentic inside of each of us, out into the world through a more skilled and confident writing approach fits perfectly with the growing momentum of our team.

Ryan’s new tagline “Run / Write / Build” beautifully captures all that we’re about.

No other endurance training team, or to my knowlegde, fitness community understands these deep synergies between mind, body, and spirit, and that’s why I love being a coach and athlete on this team.

Back to the story prof

Ok, enough about that, what’s the experiment in creativity you were promised!

Coach prompted us to write a fiction story about a mysterious box or package left on a front door, unmarked, except with the address “For You” on it. He gave us some ideas and I immediately went to the ‘use a quote you read recently as inspiration.’

I’ve been deep diving into the writing of Henry David Thoreau my idea immediately came to life from a quote of his that stuck out hard into my mind and spirit.

During our last call, he then forced us to improvise on the story with a few seemingly ‘random’ prompts and ways to edit our stories. I loved this as it forced us to be nimble in mind and creative in our story telling.

Below is my written piece, still untitled but maybe a few of you have some suggestions you can leave in the comments.

Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing.

If you’re interested in what Quillkeepers can offer you, send a message to myself or better yet, follow

Ryan Dreyer

and hit him up directly!

Let’s win together team!

Story

It’s 5:54 pm, and I struggle to peel myself away from my phone screen after pulling into my 3 car garage.

Commute from hell

Car crashes galore

Colder than the ice’s wicked spell

“I should have been home 30 minutes ago, more time wasted in the day.”

I think to myself as I continue to waste time before heading into the home to greet even more chaos. My kids have been acting up at school again, both of them. Typical.

I deserve a minute or two to just unplug and not think. Especially after ‘white knuckling’ that commute. “I can’t believe that a-hole in the mercedes cut me off right before exit 294”

My exit is 321, I’m holding onto the frustration and anger, but really i’m just down on what my life looks like day in and day out.

6:02pm, shoot, I better get into the house. I slowly force myself out of the driver’s seat and walk into the house after kicking the snow and dirt off my boots. My wife’s heating up a frozen dinner for all of us to eat, man I didn’t even think how her commute went today in these conditions. Grateful that’s she’s making dinner, but a fresh home cooked meal would be great.

My kids don’t even look up from the TV, why is it even on if they’ve gotten in trouble again at school? Oh well, I’m too tired to care, afterall I’ve had a hard day working to provide all these things for them, they should be more grateful to me.

“DING DONG”

Oh great, someone wants to sell me something. I’ve been selling ALL day, can’t I get a break.

“Can you see what’s at the door please, I’ve got my hands full.” My wife yells at me from the kitchen. She’s opening the oven and the dinner she’s ‘preparing’ splashes all over her favorite blue dress.

“Yes, dear.” I mutter while thinking “Can’t someone give ME a break for once!”

The anger and frustration turns from that dang mercedes to the family.

• Why didn’t my wife change out of her nice work dress?

• Why didn’t the kids rush to greet me at the door after my hard days works

• Where’s that tumblr of fine scotch, I need a pull right after getting this door

I move to the front without thinking, banging my elbow on the island counter in our kitchen, no one notices when I cry out “Ouch.”

I get to the door, open it, and that winter wind smashes my face again. No one at the door. What a joke. I go to slam the door shut but I notice something on the stoop.

It’s a package, freshly dropped. No stamps, no sign at all of who left it. There’s just a scribble on the manilla envelope that’s starting to get wet from the snow “Yours”

I pick it up, open it, and inside is a single page from a book. There’s a quote highlighted in the text on the yellowish page, clearly from an old book.

But what’s inside isn’t old to me at all, it’s strangely familiar.

I know this one, I read it in my english literature class in college. Oh man, that was my FAVE course, I love reading and writing. Why did I ever go into sales, I should have become a writer. All the memories come back in an instant. It’s like a dam’s burst inside my heart and the truth comes pouring out all at one.

Back to the book page, that highlighted quote is clearly the source of this well of inspiration.

"The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, - chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better."

I flip the page over and find another quote, this time not highlighted but sticking out even more BOLDLY in my mind’s eye.

"You must get your living by loving"

I’m hit with a ton of bricks right in the gut. The title at the top of the page “Life without Principle.” The name on the other side - Thoreau.

Signal received. Thank you to whoever dropped that page.

Another quote flashes through my mind, I see it more clearly than any word on this page.

This time it’s from the intro to Philosophy course I took at college, man I loved that one too! Can’t believe I forgot who I was. But now I’m never letting it go again.

““We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Confucius.