This month’s little big mood: Thinking About Unexpectedness

One gift my new friend, Nahid, has given me is a renewed appreciation for the card game Solitaire. When I arrive mid-mornings to visit, she is upstairs playing the game on her computer. “My son set this up for me,” Nahid says. I sit beside her and watch. She is quiet. Determined. Patient. When her game is finished, she closes down the computer, tells me how many games she’s won since I last saw her and then we walk downstairs to the kitchen for tea. 

Nahid is 95 years old. She arrived in Colorado more than seventy years ago soon after her wedding in Teheran, Iran. In Colorado, she raised two children, built community and accepted that returning to her family in Teheran would not be possible. Today, after a long marriage, many friends, grandchildren and years of caring for her husband, Hassan, she lives by herself.

She told me that she never played solitaire before, until now. From what I can tell, she has become very good at the game. One day when I arrived for a visit, she told me she played for four hours that day. She smiled triumphantly and said, “I won a lot of games today.” 

“What’s your solitaire strategy?” I ask Nahid as she pours tea for me and pushes the small plate of cookies to my side of the table. 

“I don’t think I have a strategy,” she says. “I just keep playing, keep starting again.”

Starting again is something I think Nahid knows very well. She has lived her life with courage, hardiness, and commitment to each day. How she plays this solitary card game at this time in her life is inspiring. She reminds me of the energy of resilience. I think about how outcomes to choices I make do not always come immediately; sometimes outcomes to choices come eventually and in unexpected ways. I just have to keep trying, make it fun. Though I may know what the cards are, it’s okay to not know how they are going to come up. Like playing solitaire. 

Happy spring and happy unexpectedness!

Gayle Nosal
Founder, Little Big Fund