A True Champion

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A True Champion

When I try to think about who I would say is a champion, I don’t think of the world heavyweight champions. They are probably the most visible, but I know there are champions in every house, neighborhood and every city. They just don’t get the same kind of press a famous boxer does.

My idea of a great champion is someone who has overcome great difficulties to achieve things the world needed and will remember. One of the greatest heroes I can think of is Helen Keller.

Though deaf and blind, she wrote 12 books. She was the first deafblind person to graduate from Radcliffe. I cannot imagine what her world was like, and it makes me value my sight and hearing so much more when I think of the darkness and silence she must have endured.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Anne Sullivan was able to teach Helen letters, which led her to discover how to spell water. Though Helen had developed some of her own signs for use in the home with her family, now she had access to words for all of the things unknown to her. After that point, a passionate desire to learn everything she could would dominate her life. Here is how she described the transformation in her book, Optimism, written in 1903.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a consummation devoutly to be wished." But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?

As the eternal optimist myself, I wonder how many of us are in the lonely emptiness, knowing only “darkness and stillness”. There is something about having an optimistic outlook that changes the entire face of the world. Helen Keller believed the effort must be made to change the world for the better, with the perspective that everything isn’t perfect, but that mustn’t stop us from trying to make the world a better place. She said it this way:

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.

I know there is a preponderance of good in the world, and to be miserable because there is evil is the shortcut. The work we have to do is to overcome the bad, and help others to find happiness and abundance. I believe there are eternal laws that will reward this type of behavior. Helen Keller said it this way:

Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life. If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness.

Helen Keller knew about chastening and renunciation, but she also knew about how personal growth and determination can overcome the difficulties we encounter. When we think about happiness, many of us have the wrong idea. It’s not a continual state of bliss, but careful and thoughtful work toward our goals. She said it this way:

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships. It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good.

I celebrate Helen Keller as a true champion. She inspires me to try to do good, to celebrate the abundance of good things in our universe, and to wonder at my part in it. I hope I can overcome my shortcomings, get outside myself, and do my best to make this world even better. Together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.