Count The Ways You Are A Champion

 Several years ago on Dancing With The Stars, a couple was eliminated and the professional teacher said that regardless of the public voting for someone who is popular, his amateur student was a                                            “champion in life.”   This goes to show that anybody who knows little or perhaps nothing about ballroom dancing should not be able to count for total scores. The public votes on who looks sexy or good or who is popular in the activities they do off the show. The voting should be left up to real professionals who understand the rules and the voting and the accomplishments of the dancers. The public is all a popularity contest as who do you like better, not who is the most qualified.

He called her a champion in life and that is something we can all subscribe to becoming in one thing we do in our life at some time. It can be anything; you could be a champion in sewing. I knew a girl in high school who was a champion sewer. She made all her own clothes and for others too and went on in her adult life to teach sewing classes at a senior center and also made designer clothes for well to do people

. I knew a lady who taught piano and voice to teenagers at a recreation center and she herself was a sought after vocalist. There are people who are teachers at elementary schools, who inspire little kids to excel in their studies. There are professors in colleges who inspire adults and teens to excel. I had one of them in 1968 that inspired me to go on as an adult of thirty-three years and I credit him, Dr.Z.John Levay now deceased, with much of my success being a writer now at a senior age and for my amateur dancing activities. His words to me that I could do better have been a mainstay of my adult life.

I know of people who are champions in life because they volunteer at different centers to help older people accomplish things on their own by teaching them some senior skills. I am acquainted with people who give of their leisure time to take senior and incapacitated folks to doctors’ appointments and get no remuneration for their gasoline costs. They do it as one woman told me “because someone helped her mom late in life, to be transported to various doctors”, so now she pays back and does it for others.

There are many others who are the opposite. I know of a young man who when you look at his tattooed arms and hands, you would not realize what a gentle giant he is. He works in a medical facility and got let go because his mom came there and she had to go to the hospital emergency room afterwards and he with permission of the doctor on duty, left to accompany his mom and dad to Sinai Hospital. He was a giving and loving son and because he cared for his mom, he was terminated or had his hours cut out as they said. However, he has another and better job and he is a champion in life because he cared about his parents. This is something to be proud of and his name is David. His employer is the opposite, he is not a champion in life, because he let go a man who was a champion.

Marge and Gower Champion had the champion name because they were truly dancers supreme in the early fifties because of their talent in dancing and choreographing for movies. Champion is an interesting last name and they deserved it for all of their dance happenings.

Anyone of us can be a champion in anything we do. We can be helpful, kind and compassionate to our elderly parents, to our children, to our spouses, to our friends. A champion does not have to earn a blue ribbon, a trophy or a certificate. A champion in life, is a decent, delightful, doing, and devoted person to a cause or a human being.  The couple who were terminated still did a dance of life, as far as I am concerned and I do have thirty-six years of dancing myself and I know excellent work when I see it.

Life can be a dance, a dance of movement to assist others, a few moments of giving someone a great time by taking some homebound persons a basket of goodies that they cannot get for themselves; a conversation on the phone some days to help a lonely soul pass the time with good thoughts, a visit of even an hour to someone who cannot get about too often, even in these modern times, a sweet email of a joke, a saying or a magazine you brought them. Even a box of sweet desserts to someone who can no longer bake for herself or shop to buy sweet things. Also, if you can drive someone to a supermarket and let them have the pleasure of picking out the food supplies; this makes you a champion in life to yourself or to the recipient.

Sometimes when I am feeling a bit  not modest, I think that maybe I am a champion in writing, of all these encouraging articles to inspire everyone to ballroom dance, to be a champion of sorts in something and most of all to keep the flow of reassuring words, on what they are capable of doing now at any age.

Let us all have the ambition to be a champion about something, someone, or some place. Whatever little we are able to accomplish, light will be on in a person’s life that you entered some way or someday.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning said in a poem “How do I love thee, let me count the ways.”

We show our love in many ways every day when we become a champion of life.