Patience is the key

My day today was all about patience. I spent 4 hours in the doctor's office waiting for the next blood sample in a series of tests (don't worry!) and then and another 2 hours making my way home. While I was sitting in the doctor's office I had an amusing hour or so with an older Turkish man (about my father's age). He didn't speak a work of English so you can imagine how slow going our conversation was. Being bored and stuck in one place is a great motivator for struggling on with patience. After two hours of reading I was getting bored an needed a new distraction so I pulled out my game of SET. If you don't know the game it looks like a person is just randomly picking up cards that have odd shapes on them. It was enough to engage the interest of this man and so I asked him if he would like to learn how to play. Right. What did I just get myself into? How to explain that there are four different characteristics and that you have to have all the same or all different? And how do you say stripes in Turkish anyways? But with some patience on both of our parts and a lot of pointing and examples he picked up on the idea. And we played. Or rather I helped him learn throughout one game. I'll give him credit - he didn't give up, and by then bottom of the deck was learning how to put together a set of three cards. It's just unfortunate he'll probably never see the game again. But it sure was a great way to interact with him - and made a lot of people in the office smile to see/hear me try to explain the rules to him. That real interaction is exactly why it pays to take my i-pod off every once in a while and truly mingle.