Everything Is Connected
I’m not exactly sure when the idea of doing a pullup seized me. It must have been watching a woman at the gym one morning with a long blonde braid down her back effortlessly lift her chin to the bar and then ease back down again; six times in a row without pause. The firing of muscles, the strength and beauty of a muscular lift by a woman while others were trimming and toning was breathtaking. I was entranced, struck by her eyes-closed determination. Maybe it was then, at that singular moment, that the ability to do a pullup became the symbolic answer to everything: I’d practice the strength it would take to lift up and away from the gravity of life.
Over the years I did pull downs, bent over rows, pullovers, pushups. I did planks until I trembled, rowed on an erg machine, and added pullups on an assist, moving the pin to lower the weight for extra help until over time I could manage one, then three, and on a good day, four wobbly unassisted pullups. I wasn’t interested in trimming and toning. I dreamed of big biceps, fat quads down my legs, a wedge-shaped back.
“It’s not possible,” Olivia, my Irish trainer said. “You’re too tall, the muscle fibers are long and will develop down, not out. You’d have to work out two hours a day, six days a week, to get close to that.”
She pointed her chin to a pumped up woman doing slow and perfect lunges with 20 pound weights in each hand. I could only manage to be at the gym for an hour three days a week. I sighed, gripped the pulldown bar and heaved-ho. I was not the gorgeous blonde with animal intention. I was middle aged with four children, a mortgage, and an outsized idea of the athletically possible. I may not get that bulging form, but this is enough, I said to myself sweating and lifting. I couldn’t know then that thirty years later a pullup would save me.
It was dusk as PW and I moved our sailboat into Port Ludlow marina. It had been a long day of motoring across the rough Straits of Juan de Fuca, “Straits of Wanta Fuckya” my fishermen sons call it, staying alert to the weather and tides and the commands of PW. Docking a boat, any boat, is always a high anxiety event for me, but particularly on our long unblemished sailboat. I was poised, taut, on the edge of the boat clutching a spring line reading boat speed and the wind. Was the tide ebbing or flooding? Were there cleats for the lines or kick rails to hitch around? How far down was the dock for my leap? Will my knee hold? Will the tide push out the bow and I’d need to move lightening-fast to secure the bow line?
I misjudged everything in the dim light: the green slime-slippery dock, the unusual drop, and my own athleticism. I slipped clutching a boat stanchion in one hand, and the spring line in the other as my legs fell into the water and into one of the most dangerous situations on a boat: the unmerciful smash of a body between a dock and the vessel. I was dead silent, dropped the line, swung my hand to another stanchion, squeezed my eyes shut and willed the body to do one thing, one thing only, as the familiar world dropped away and the dark water opened its mouth to swallow me. One mighty and massive pullup.
The muscles fired with fear, my biceps strained and I hauled myself onto the deck, trembling, searching wildly for the next moment, fueled by what I had just done, overcome with my reckless disregard of what I should have considered, and then something else flooded me: a cold and hard satisfaction that I had done a pullup, a very tricky pullup, to save myself. As if all the weight training, all those years of heaving myself up to a bar saved me, the work building to this moment between grievous injury and an intact body.
Everything changes, everything is connected, pay attention Buddhism counsels. The lines ran through my head like a mantra that night pondering the mystery of a woman with a blonde braid who showed up 30 years ago at just the right moment, believing as I lay in the dark with my unbroken body that the quirky passions, the random asides can sometimes be just enough to save you.