I remember a game of Gin Rummy I played with my grandfather. We both sat there trying to find sets of cards of the same rank and runs from low to high so we could score points. I’d draw one card and discard another time after time looking for that one that would let me score big but it just wasn’t there. Draw, discard, draw, discard, draw, discard. My turn came around again and Grandpa’s face lit up. He picked it right up into his hand and proudly laid  down a neatly matched set. I had set down the wrong card and given him what he needed, I laughed when I saw the card I was looking for had been in his hand the whole time.

I didn’t realize it on the day, but that hand of Gin had a few lessons to teach me. One little shift in what I did transformed a dull logjam into just the situation my Grandfather needed to win and for us to get on with our game. It showed me that sometimes the options that I wasn’t willing to consider were the key to getting things moving again, but maybe the most important thing was that I needed to lose that game to move on to my next chance to win. Now when I find myself in a situation with no options, I just remember to look at it in a different way, find something I hadn’t considered before, or maybe even that sometimes we just have to go with how the cards fall rather than trying to force something on them.

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