Did you ever play with dominos when you were a kid? Or even when you were older? I don’t know, maybe dominos have gone out of fashion these days. So many things have. Kids have so much electronic gear and so many high tech toys today, I don’t know how much time they spend playing Monopoly and Clue, building things with Tinkertoys or Erector Sets, or Lincoln Logs for that matter, or playing card games. Kids used to do that, before Xboxes came along, and hand-held Game Boys and their spawn. No one had ever heard of text messages only a decade or so ago. But they’re what kids do these days. All this new stuff. And all the old stuff, which was pretty entertaining, lies idle. So, do today’s kids even know what dominos are?
There were several games we played with dominos when I was a kid, but what I liked best wasn’t playing the games they were designed for, but instead, using them to build long, snaking lines, each one standing upright on its narrow edge, about an inch apart on each wide flat side from its neighbors. The line could curve and twist and separate into two, three, four—well, as many lines as you had dominos to build with. The lines could run in their own directions, or if you were clever enough, come back together, intersect, or pass over or through each other.
You had to be careful. A lot of time could be spent setting up your creation, and one little slip while setting a domino in position could cause the entire thing to come slithering down, and you’d have to start over again. You learned, eventually, belatedly, to leave gaps in your lines so a mishap wouldn’t wipe out everything, just the section back to your last gap.
You’d build this long, intricate construction of dominos, using what creativity and skill you had, and then, when you were finished and you’d gathered an audience, you’d hold your breath and, with anticipation building, gently nudge the first domino and let it tumble into the one standing closest to it, which would fall into the next, and while you watched with glee, the entire construction would slowly fall, the separate tracks slithering their own ways or intermingling back together, all impelled by that initial little nudge you gave it.
It was when you were older that you learned there was a name for this: the domino effect it was called. Still is. And it’s become a metaphor for all sorts of things. It speaks to one thing happening and impacting on another, and another, and the repercussions that can be generated by one simple action. Or one not so simple action.
It happens all the time, one little thing causing others, big and small, and sometimes we’re not even aware of the initial cause. But sometimes we are. Sometimes what causes the repercussions is very obvious. But the repercussions can take paths one wouldn’t expect. Life is like that. Complicated. Unexpected. Surprising.