A pull-up is not just a physical feat. It is a physical expression of the process of learning how to pull myself up — not just physically, but also mentally and spiritually — with ease, with skill and without assistance. It is one of many ways to express, figuratively and literally, the strength to be able to move the entirety of the weight one is carrying, going against the grain of gravity to do so, and overcome with dynamic poise.
But I’m not preaching individualism and egoic heroism. For I know the ability to even do a pull-up depends on the many conditions that make it possible, most importantly other people who have learned how to do one themselves and have imparted their knowledge onto you. Without dependence on these vast myriad others (not just human others but non-human others such as your food and the cells in your own body), your individual feat of performing even a single pull-up (especially when controlled, dead-hang initiated, unassisted, and at full-ROM with a momentary pause on the top) would be impossible. I am nothing without all these others, but in dependence on all these others I can become something, something more than I was previously.
A pull-up is the consummate result of a dynamic creative interplay between self and world, a dance between the limits of settled conditions (of physics, of biomechanics, of neurophysiology, of the whole socio-politico-economic order) and the zestful pursuit of unleashing your core potential (spirit’s innate tendency to want to exceed itself). It is the many disjunctive forces of the universe coming into conjunctive unity in the one occasion of experience that is your performance of the pull-up, from the complete dead-hang at the bottom to peak contraction at the absolute apex of the movement.
The abstract virtual or “eternal” object that is the platonic form of the pull-up finds concrete material realization in the never-repeatable, unique configuration that is your own mind-body nexus at this time in this place. Every pull-up is virtually the same, but each one you actually do is irreducibly yours, and it is the achievement of all cosmic history in that single moment. You are not just pulling yourself up, but you are the entire universe pulling itself up through the gateway of your perspective.
Everything that ever was, everything that is, and every kind of thing there could be, shares the exact same essence as this one single physical act of pulling yourself up on your own. Everything depends on everything else and so nothing truly belongs to anything, and yet the final achievement of an occasion of experience is always intimately one’s own.
Then the inexorable procession of time makes the public side of your achievement, which you privately experienced from your own perspective, a gift offered up to the world, allowing you to become someone who someone else can depend on their own journey of coming into their own as someone who can pull themselves up all on their own
