Dominoes

Domino has been one of my favorite games as a child.

Every weekend, coming to my grandparent’s home, I had to take the light green rectangular box, with Cyrillic inscriptions on it and play the game. Each time, I didn’t know what 7 blocks I would get. Each time I never knew, what was ahead of me, except the fact that I had to build a maze of tiles…

I catch whatever flies in my house. Most of the times that’s a stinky bug, stationed on a wall, ready to be intoxicated by “Medical Ethanol, 96%”. A few minutes later I stand with a magnifying glass, holding forceps and examining the structure of the bug: I hear myself saying „coxa, trochanter, femur“…

Stinky bug is that annoying buzzing insect, which smells like a forgotten pit latrine whenever you crush it. Though to me, stinky bug is yet another biological adventure. It is a structure, a maze, a connection of subtle details: its inner and outer composition complementing each other and their functions, reflecting their evolutionary history and offering us a look into the past.

To me a dandelion, is a maze: a formula of a complex flower, with each of its petals being a separate flower, with each of its blowballs being a seed and an offspring of its own.

To me every song, is consequent to the thoughts of the creator, is a maze of his past expressed through notes, chords, symmetry.

I always liked tracing the dominoes back to their origins, trying to figure out their beginnings, reducing its paths and breaking down each step.

Reductionism: that’s the strategy I followed. And I followed:

We are a bunch of tiles. Most probably quite mediocre ones.

We are different from another bunch of tiles by 0.1% of them, at most.

We are born with tiles and we get a label. We get a box with that label to pile our dominoes up.

We start building the maze, but we are not the only architects.

We represent a maze, with our tiles and the tiles from all of the other “bunch of dominoes”, the players of our life. We are extension of our intentions, and the intentions of others.

I say a maze, for a reason.

We are not aware of the tiles we have. We can follow the maze only at some parts.

We cannot control, envision or plan our path.

But… We can control the speed of its extension. It is our choice, whether we engage with the environment, whether we let the people inspire us, whether we drive ourselves towards a goal.

It is our choice, whether we give away our tiles. It is our choice, what tiles we give away. We are responsible for them. This responsibility, and the freedom comes with a cost.

As our, mine and everyone else’s mazes get built up, it gets harder to trace our way back to the start, the line fades away between each path and the maze turns into a world.

We become a person, a maze of experiences. And the way we ensure, that we stay one, is that we never stop going to the stock: we never let our tiles end, even though we are eager to give them away.

I see life as a huge domino game, too complex for our consciousness to imagine. We all consist of the same tiles, as does the universe around us. Though there is one big difference between this game and the reality: life is over, when we do not have any tiles left. We continue to exist, as long as our tiles are there somewhere, building and constituting our and someone else’s maze.