A New Quest(ion) Begins

A new quest (and blog-project) begins!

The last time I enjoyed a blog-project, of sorts, I was reading Jewish dietary laws and cleaning out my kitchen in preparation for a day of kashering and then four weeks of kashrut observance. That was nearly two years ago, with a variety of writing tasks catching my attention and energies. I’ve joined a women’s writing organization, flirted with poetry a bit more regularly, even enjoyed writing for writing’s sake, i.e. writing without a predetermined goal. I’ve learned a lot about myself too, with some deepening awareness, consciousness extended back into old narratives that had seemed too fearful or dark for reconsideration. (They weren’t). Several small goals have appeared in these journeys, but a well-defined one has become this quest, of sorts. I hadn’t thought of it as a new blog-project, but when I shared a brief essay piece about it with my writing-circle small group, one of them planted the seed of suggestion. Voila! It has grown into a preliminary post. So what is the new quest?

I aim to do one pull-up by my birthday in mid-March. Just one. It need not be pretty, nor technically flawless. Hanging on the bar, then one chin-up above it. That’s it. To mark my learnings and celebrate my progress is the blog task, I am presuming.

Why and what has this come to mean to me? I don’t have hopes of being immediately comprehensible in why this matters so much to me. What’s the big deal about a woman of my body-type and build doing a pull-up? Perhaps that’s part of the draw. 

To start, I’ve been immersed in about two years’ worth of personal-training at a local gym, various goals in mind over the months. I had originally imagined running a marathon or half-marathon, but as I listened to my own body-awakening in these weekly 'tutorials,' of sorts, that goal waned in lieu of other, less articulate pursuits:  fitness, flexibility, learning, loving, sensate awakening. Along the way, I’ve discovered that the fitness world is so much bigger than my rather one-dimensional focus on distance-running.  I’m fascinated with how the body moves, specifically how my body moves, and various ways to play with weights, machines, body-resistance training, and more. I’ve also grown curious about the inherited manners in which I conceive fitness, how we think about its importance and contour, how women experience our overculture’s obsessions and guilts about the human body and its fitness (or lack thereof), how I have experienced my body as a woman regularly trapped in a superfund site of media-saturated, imputed feminine and religious-traditional toxins.

True to form, I approach these fascinations and curiosities as a Christian theologian, if one increasingly unwilling to accept my tradition’s assumptions, language, and absences of the female body. For most centuries, it has neglected, abused, and ignored the body, particularly the female body. So, I find myself a Christian theologian with few resources that are not already toxic in and of themselves. I’ve also found few companions who are similarly unwilling to ingest a tradition’s 'good intentions' that are steeped in ignorance—both male and female—or even worse, malice and abuse.

The quest begins, though, with my sixth-grade self, second in line to the pull-up bar, where I awaited Ms. Hill to call me forward for that spring’s dose of shame and impossibility. Every spring, the Presidential Fitness Test would loom, which aimed to measure the fitness of the nation’s children, to communicate a governmental commitment to children’s health. Whatever else it may have provided, with statistical precision, it taught me one inexorable truth: Fitness is Fearful. The worst was being second in line, watching my girl friend hang helplessly at the bar, being timed for how long she could hang. The boys behind us would smirk and complain that girls were not required to do pull-ups proper, like the boys. “Wimps,” they’d say, disdainfully. Even when many of the boys couldn’t do a pull-up either. Standing there, second in line, you had to watch and then accept that the girl in front of you was ashamed and ‘unfit.’ Then you would be named the same when it was your turn. Yee-haw.

Another more implicit learning in this spring ritual impressed itself onto my own flesh as well: “My body is too heavy for any good, especially anything upper body oriented.” Lifting, endurance work? I’ll find somewhere else to be. Three decades later, I still fear my bodyweight and the impotence of my upper body.  Usually, this comes up in the obvious unavoidables: doctors’ office visits with their scales of shame, menstrual mornings of weakness when I, for some unimaginable reason, think it’s a good time to step on the scale. Days of moving furniture or stacks of books from one office to the next.

Imagine my surprise, then, when months of personal training developed into a fascination for the pull-up bar. Something about its impossibility, but also its invitation to a sort of freedom, weightlessness, playfulness...even for adults? Really? A couple women of muscular build and fingerless gloves caught my attention too—hands on bar, hanging, toes to hands. I marveled, but appreciated seeing women enjoy themselves this way.

So…my new goal, with a smiling face: one pull-up by my birthday in March.  My first guess is that one pull-up promises me something much more important than any Presidential Test Assessment of Fitness. I want to learn, come to truly know in my bones: my body is just as it needs to be, as I learn what that is and as I’m finally taught by those who know a woman’s body.  

I’m also eager to see whether facing the bar will make my sixth-grade self smile, perhaps even give my beloved PE teacher the bird for never preparing us nor inviting us to consider the beautiful mystery and wisdom of the human body.  I don’t hold it against her too hard—she was not trained to do so, nor could she actually do a pull-up anymore either, by the time I met her—but I’m eager to see whether I can learn what my sixth-grade self needs to learn, then share it with any and all young women who would benefit from such learnings.

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to name my own definition of fitness (tentative, for now) and really live into it, with my own body and form. Fitness is being able to do what the body can do, when it needs to, for things we imagine, for the age we are and the needs of our lives at the moment.