A
s I was sitting cross-legged lining up dom-
inos on my aunt’s kitchen floor, she told
me the domino effect was teaching me to
make good decisions in life. In my pig-tailed, youth-
ful wonder I couldn’t internalize her profound ad-
vice, but years later, I realized she was right. In the
opening scene of “Collateral Beauty,” Will Smith’s
character Howard seeks a resolution by setting off
an impressive domino structure as he grieves the
death of his six-year-old daughter to cancer. One
flick of the wrist and rows upon rows of all colors of
dominoes give way to intersecting paths, toppling
structures and branches of dead ends.
Last year, as one of the thousands of freshmen in
a handful of residence halls, hundreds of hallways
and numerous rooms, I ended up living across the
hall from someone I played softball against in high
school. I doubt I’ll ever know the probability of that
happening, but it still feels like too much of a coinci-
dence. Of all the people that could have been placed
in that exact room in 4th Butler of Mary Markley
Residence Hall, she was someone who, before com-
ing to the University of Michigan, knew both me
and my hometown. She was someone who shared
my interest in playing club softball and was willing to
take on all the boys in pickup basketball at the Cen-
tral Campus Recreation Building. It was someone
who would quickly become one of my best friends
and a crucial facet of my freshman year experience
that was devastatingly altered just over a year ago by
the ongoing pandemic.
Despite the sad end to my time in Markley, the
instances in which I felt lucky my freshman year
are innumerable labyrinths of dominos. Upon cre-
ating my first-semester schedule, there were tons
of freshman-level reading requirement courses that
fit with my schedule, and I arbitrarily chose one. My
Graduate Student Instructor for English 125 became
the most influential person I have encountered at
the University and impacted my thinking, writing
and academic interests in ways I will never be able
to fully articulate. During a required seminar for
freshmen, I made one of my closest friends after mu-
tual laughter when a student started snoring on her
shoulder. From singing karaoke in someone’s house
near East Quad Residence Hall to airdropping pic-
tures of my dog to clueless diners in Mosher-Jordan
Residence Hall, some of my best memories from my
freshman year were made from spontaneous mo-
ments and last-minute plans with strangers.
Needless to say
, my time in Markley did not end
as wonderfully as it began. Now, a year after students
packed up their residence hall rooms and apartments
during the onset of what would become the worst
pandemic in a hundred years, I don’t feel as warm and
fuzzy as I did sharing a twin XL with hallmates while
binging Netflix or sitting under the indoor street lights
of the Chemistry Building. In the mess of reflecting
on the colorful moments, full of teary-eyed laughter,
too many Mosher-Jordan cookies and feelings that if
people are truly supposed to end up somewhere, that
this is where I was supposed to be, I wonder how I
came to be sitting here, hands on the keyboard. I won-
der how I was lucky enough to end up across the hall
from Kat. I wonder how I ended up at the University.
And all I see are dominos.
I know that these ponderings are arguably fu-
tile since I will never fully understand the way luck
and my own have led me to my current circum-
stances of being a student at this University that
has allowed me to feel lucky about my hallmates or
my remarkable English 125 GSI. I will never know
whether I would have been admitted to the Univer-
sity if I hadn’t been glued to a book after school every
day from first through fifth grade or if I had taken
one less SAT exam practice test. I will never know
whether I would have ever been in such a position
to read after school, let alone exist, if my mom had
not spent every day after elementary school working
on her family farm and cooking for a family of eight.
I’ll never be able to distinguish the extent of my re-
sponsibility for my present circumstances, in part
because luck and free will interact to create reality.
I had no control over being born, nevertheless into
a family that raised me to be able to apply and enroll
at the University. But I chose to read every day after
school. I had no control over growing up in Michigan
with one of the best public universities in the world
in my backyard. But I took the Advanced Placement
classes, served on student Senate and applied — and
luckily, my application resonated enough to set off
the next domino of my enrollment. The unfath-
omable fragility and intricacy of our circumstances
leave us with much uncertainty, yet we are curious to
explore, understand and, in some ways, control the
intersections of how the universe acts and how we
act in the universe that create reality as we know it.
Within the quandaries of free will and fate, it
seems that our lives are a product of the two — are
we either absolutely powerful or powerless over
our ability to make decisions and influence our cir-
cumstances? Be it fate, physics, some higher power
or some combination of all three, our lives are lab-
yrinths of dominos, a line of paths converging and
diverging, twisting into roundabouts and dead ends,
falling into mountains of obstacles and sharp turns.
The paths of our lives are not mazes, but reflecting
on the reality that reality is a product of what we con-
trol and all that we cannot make us feel as though we
are lost in one. I do not think we will ever fully un-
derstand how the dominos are positioned or appor-
tioned or why they fall the way they do. Now more
than ever, I am overwhelmed and exhausted by this
notion. But despite being unable to fathom exactly
how reality comes to be, how I have come to be sit-
ting here, in this exact moment, writing this, I cannot
entertain the idea of dismissing our role in creating
our circumstances and contributing to the state of
our world by believing that “it is what it is” or even
worse, that “everything happens for a reason.”
This is not to say that we ought to constantly
consider the profound mechanics of the product
of fate and will. Whatever led me to laugh on the
fourth floor of Markley on Thursday nights and
sing Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” to the 3 a.m.
audiences of the Butler bathroom merits little spec-
ulation compared to the unpacking of events of the
past year. The first is partially a product of my doing,
and the latter is something that I have relatively little
control over, though it has come to significantly alter
my life. Nevertheless, contemplating both situations
has led me to recognize the domino effect in each,
created by the intricacies of chance and human de-
cision-making. The role of human decision-making
in creating the current state of the world, regardless
of the extent of the impact, asserts the importance of
human agency. In many ways, society places a pre-
mium on human agency, for both better and worse.
In the case of the pandemic, human agency has con-
tributed to the millions of lives lost to COVID-19 over
the past year as it has simultaneously saved others. I
am not sure where we draw the line between uni-
versal forces and will, but following guidelines and
internalizing their impact in the realness of whether
someone lives or dies bluntly indicates the impor-
tance of human agency despite uncertainty.
Human agency is necessary to critically con-
sider when reflecting on how we came to this
point, and furthermore when holding individuals
accountable, writing the history books and learn-
ing lessons from this dark time such that we can
create and hope for a better future. In light of the
overwhelming uncertainty and confusion towards
the origins of my own life experiences, I ultimately
feel inclined towards the manta of controlling what
we can control. In “Collateral Beauty,” Smith’s
character says human decisions are influenced
because we “long for love, we wish we had more
time and we fear death,” while these elements si-
multaneously exist in and influence the universe as
we experience it. While we are unable to fully con-
trol love, time or death, we value and honor their
existence and influence on the decisions we make
in spite of the uncertainty. Since realizing my sister
will be moving across the country in the fall, I take
every opportunity to see her before our paths spent
together as children, and now as young adults, are
about to diverge indefinitely. Seeing the toll of the
pandemic on my friends and family as the death
count rises leads me to send more letters, cards and
voicemails to convey my love for the people in my
life.
We must revere and respect the role of human
agency in the domino effect. We cannot dismiss the
significance or undermine the complexity of how
fate and humans will interact even if we can never
understand it. I’ll never understand how I came to sit
here or consider all the ways I could be somewhere
else doing something else at this exact moment in
time. My hands on this keyboard and your eyes fol-
lowing these words are dominos profoundly placed
by love, time and death, by luck and will to form re-
ality; through the twists and turns, highs and lows,
waves and ripples, countless spirals and tendrils set
throughout the journey of life, we accept the domi-
no effect for what it is, our reality, and do our best to
make it one of profound and bold purpose, meaning
and collateral beauty.
Human Hands, Sets of Cards and the Domino Effect
BY LEAH LESZCZYNSKI, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
4A — Wednesday, March 17, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY