'5 Minutes'

If there’s one thing we, at The Ashoka Tree, know for a fact about donating - it’s that donating is something that doesn’t actually take much more than a single second’s worth of decision to decide you want to give somebody something.  Whether something as small as the cup of coffee you’ve got in your hand when you see somebody on the street who’d probably benefit more from that warm cuppa or a part of your salary that could probably get a couple of children desks to write on at school. 

The very act of giving warms corners of your heart you otherwise could never have known exist.  It’s a feeling of knowing you can think of people other than yourself, a feeling of knowing there’s somebody out there who needs love much more than you do.  It’s the feeling of being able to share some of your love – being able to spread a smile.  It’s just a simple thought – and that’s all that counts.

The whole concept of “donating” tends to get blown out of proportion in this exaggerated world that we sometimes live in.  Donating blood takes nothing more than 5 minutes of your time and donating money just as long as it takes to write a cheque.  As ‘time consuming’ as these 5 minutes may seem, take a moment to understand that your ‘5 minutes’ is probably changing somebody’s life somewhere.  The blood you donate is saving someone’s loved one from dying and that money giving a child a meal somewhere.  While it’s just as easy to forget where we spent our time, it’s even easier to forget there are people who need it.

If you have just ‘5 minutes’ to spare today, spare those minutes for somebody other than yourself and your needs.  Take a look at the larger picture and see the world for what it really is.  Your ‘5 minutes’ could mean the world to somebody somewhere, and the better you spend it, the better you feel.