The Survey

My cardiologist told me that he is proud of me for giving of myself. By that he meant that I write these articles on encouraging everyone to dance and especially seniors and I receive no money for it. He said that giving of one’s self is very important to the quality of life we have now. He meant that I and others who do such work and it is called volunteer work are worthy people. He said he is proud of me especially since I am a senior citizen helping other senior citizens to be valuable. When you respond to a survey, ten or five is the highest and best number. When you get a blood test, your cholesterol number lower is best. On the HDL part of cholesterol test, the higher number is better than a low number. So numbers can be good in some instances if they are high and high is their top and in some blood tests, high is good and some other parts of the test, lower is best. So take a survey of yourself and see if you award your self a high number in accomplishing dancing or golfing or tennis or knitting or reading. Take your survey and survey you and you will probably win a blue ribbon for excellence in being a person. My friend Virginia told me she lights lots of candles in her home because the smoke from the candles as it burns swirls up to Heaven and with that she gives prayers for the sick and the departed. She has become a widow and I think it makes her feel good to think that the smoke from a candle could probably reach her departed husband. I, myself am not a candle or a smoke person. Each person has his own manner to accomplish value and this value gives them a feeling of accomplishment or can ease pain. While I was writing this, I got a call from Comcast who is our cable provider. It was automated and wanted my response to their replies to a new service I wanted to add. It said that a one was low satisfaction and a five was very good satisfaction. The automated call asked about seven questions and I responded five to each one with my touchtone phone. Just think if we could respond to other people that way when dealing with them and we could press our phone or our cell phone as we talked to them. How many would we be giving a five to and how many a one to. Many people we are involved with in our daily lives leave us with not always a pleasant couple of minutes or even a moment. If we could show them, we were dissatisfied with them right at the moment, that would be fun and would give us an outlet with our dissatisfaction or our satisfaction. When I was going to dances regularly,I would see many people dancing who I would have given a five to when I had social interaction with them. There were some others who I would have given a minus zero to. The high numbers were the folks who would help to encourage new people to continue on with lessons or just to come to a dance. The low numbers would be to people who tried to discourage others. I had that experience once when an elderly man told me that I was dancing the Tango wrongly. I went up to him and told him I was ( we) dancing it correctly, we were doing the American Tango, not the International Tango. He backed down and realized he was wrong and the odd thing was that he could barely dance and the women he asked to dance did not turn him down. They did not want to hurt his feelings, so they suffered for three minutes and did a kind thing. That is better than making him feel sad, but he in turn told me that I was doing it wrong because he had no knowledge of the American Tango and thought he was being smart in commenting to me on it. I put it aside because of his advanced age and when I told it to him, I was talking very gently to him. That would have given me a five on a survey, being kind and not barking back at him “you do not know what you are talking about.” You cannot put a wall around your heart when dealing with people. However, if they try to intimidate you about your dancing, then you can put a wall around yourself and not bother to include them in your conversations or company. They will get the message and the message is that we dancers should all be able to compliment new dancers, rather than frighten or bully them into thinking they will never be good dancers. Unlike the television show Dancing With The Stars, where the amateur takes about seven hours a week or even a day of lessons, we regular people take only one or two lessons a week and some cannot even afford that. They still go to dances and get up and dance and I applaud them because they are doing what they like and even if they do not do it up to our standards, they are to be admired. Any form of dancing is good for the health of our bodies and the wealth to our mind is not measureable. We are increasing our brain power, our arm and leg power and most of all our happiness power. Power means energy and strength and if we continue to increase our mind power too, then we have won the battle of aging. We can dance on for many of our senior years and we will feel good, happy and successful. So give yourself a number five when evaluating your dancing ability and strive for even a six or seven. Comcast on their survey had no sixes or sevens; I am adding that to my survey. Be confident, be strong, be delightful, be happy and most of all dance. Dancing will enhance your life, your attitude, your health and make you probably a ten on a scorecard. Ten being quite high and high you will attain, because you strive for everything that is worthwhile with ballroom dancing. Elita Sohmer Clayman