Blood and Kindness

After over half a year since my last plasma donation, I finally had the opportunity to donate blood again tonight! Between the plasma incident that occurred earlier this year that resulted in me accidentally losing a sizable portion of blood and my tenure in middle-of-nowhere Saskatchewan that began right as I was able to donate again, it has been quite some time since my last donation. To be honest, as my last ten-ish donations have all been plasma, it has actually been a little over a year since my last whole blood donation. 

When I stop to think about the actual donation process, I believe some may consider it an act of kindness; you are going out of your way to do something which is beneficial to another human being with no guarantee or desire of recompense. It made me reflect on my motivations behind donation and whether or not mindsets can affect the legitimacy of an act of kindness. 

To start with, I have no physical deterrence from donation. I am consistently eligible, I have no physical or psychological  issues with needles or blood, I have O- blood (I like to brag about that), so on and so forth. I believe these factors contribute to a person's desire NOT to donate, however. Being eligible to donate or being unphased by needles is not something which drives a person towards donation, but it can definitely drive them away from it. As such, I believe these “neutral values” simply contribute to making it easier to attend.

As for my actual motivation to attend, the easy answer I state is that I do it for my mother. I strongly believe in paying things forward and as she is unable to pay forward the generosity of the many donations she's received herself, it is my responsibility as her son to do so in her stead. On a more personal level, those donations she received are the reason she is here today in the capacity she is. I have the mother I have because of those donations. If my donations can allow another child and parent the opportunity to experience that, how can I turn my back?

Another factor I believe in is, as Spider-Man would say, with great power comes great responsibility. I have the ability to donate and I do not lose anything. It is within my power. And as such, is it not my responsibility? The third point in the Black Belt Code of Ethics states that one shall “undertake and accept responsibility only for tasks in which they are qualified for and in which they believe”. I believe in the tasks of sustaining life where it is needed yet I am not qualified to save lives as a doctor or a medic could. However, if I can provide the material necessary for these experts to perform their responsibilities, that is a responsibility which I can and should undertake. 

Ultimately, however, I also strongly believe in karma (which sort of falls under the same category as my belief in paying it forward). As mentioned a few blogs ago, I am a person who is afraid of progress, afraid of the future, and afraid of what I do not know. As such, I fear that the struggles my mother has undergone will one day become my own. I fear that I may be struck with illness or disease, as illness and disease are such ruthless and defining characteristics of all living things. I fear that, when the day comes when I am subject to all of these fears, I will be left in a state where I am unable to live on my own terms.

That, I think, is my biggest fear in life. To not be able to live on my own terms.

When I donate, I donate for all the reasons above. But the last I mentioned, which I recognize as selfish and somewhat paranoid, feels like the little beating heart at the core of it all. I need to build my karma. I need to do it for me. I need to make sure I am okay. Do not get me wrong, every reason stated is still dearly important to me. It is why I contributed to organizing the blood drive, and why I will do so again in the future. But I cannot help but feel that everything is built on selfish grounds.

With all of that said and my heart on my sleeve, do my donations count as an act of kindness? Ultimately, I personally do not believe so. I believe blood donation is not something I willingly choose to do, yet is something that my personal beliefs require me to do. All of my reasons- the selfless, the selfish, the caring, the self-sufficient, the seemingly nonsensical, they all lead me to believe that my actions are done not out of kindness for others nor for the sake of myself, but it is something that simply needs to be done. 

I could keep going on about whether or not the mindset of “something needing to be done” automatically negates the qualification of an act of kindness, but this blog has already run longer than I wanted (sorry guys).

If you made it this far, cheers!