You don’t have to look hard these days to find frustrations or things that seem unnecessarily annoying. Ira Riklis knows that we sometimes run into those situations even when we’re trying to something good for others. At those moments, when we perhaps expect a little gratitude and for things to be made easy, it can be even more off-putting to run into illogical demands or other impediments to our doing our “good deed.”
At times like that, when you think things aren’t going as smoothly as we think we should, Ira Riklis has found that the best way to stay calm is by having a good sense of humor about the situation. He’s learned to practice that philosophy at certain times when he’s donating blood—something he does on a semi-regular basis each year. An example is one occasion where the blood center was using a form he felt was unduly invasive of his privacy. When he pointed out they really didn’t need all that information in order to safely take his blood, the receptionist informed him that if he didn’t fill in all the little boxes, they wouldn’t take his blood. A counter argument seemed pointless, so he did the only thing he could do: grin and bear it.