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

