These are your dominoes, the dominoes of your life:

Around them, are all the dominoes of your family and home:

Around those dominoes, are your extended family, friends, church, local community:

Around those, are the wider culture and the world.

Let’s look at your dominoes. You’ve got your relational dominoes, career dominoes, health dominoes:

Every aspect of your life is represented here. There are quite a few of these dominoes, and they’re different for everyone. If every aspect of your life was put together , your dominoes would be a nice, orderly circle:

But here’s the problem: dominoes tip. We neglect our health, and that domino tips, hitting other dominoes.

 It hits our dominoes, and it hits our families’ dominoes. Because our health is suffering, our career suffers because we can’t work so much. Your career domino might destabilize, or it might fall over.

Our career domino destabilized our finances domino, and our marriage domino. Your spouse’s and kid’s dominoes begin to fall.

We’re getting a big chain reaction, just because one domino fell.

If you’re a particularly considerate (or, more likely, guilt-oriented) person, you might try to help set up your family’s dominoes before you set up your own. Say your poor health has affected your relationship with your wife and kids: you spend so much time feeling crappy that you don’t have much time to spend with them. Guilt might drive you to try to set up their dominoes while your health domino is still down, but your fallen domino is taking up space in their lives. All the dominoes in their lives now are a little more cramped, a little closer together.

 This means if one of their dominoes fall, or one of your dominoes fall they’re likely to hit more dominoes than usual, and chain reactions are bigger and more dangerous. 

Having one domino down means everything is harder: it’s harder to have a good career if your finances suck, it’s hard to be healthy if you hate your work, it’s hard to be a good employee when your marriage is on the rocks.

This is why setting up your dominoes first is often more important than trying to help other people set up their dominoes – although it rarely feels more important.

Of course, most of us don’t have just one domino down. Most of our lives look roughly like this:

We frantically set dominoes back up, but they’re falling faster than we can set them up. Our car breaks down because our finances and our home dominoes are down. A check bounces because our career domino is down. Our health domino is down because we’re getting depressed because our purpose domino is down.

But there’s worse news. As our family’s dominoes fall, they start creating random chain reactions in our family and community:

This is why most bad things happen. Individual people are neglectful of their dominoes, and enough personal dominoes down cause really, really big dominoes to fall. A cop nurses his hatred and resentment until it explodes in violent force. A overworked man with too many dominoes down falls asleep at the wheel and strikes a cyclist. 

They’re all chain reactions – sometimes very long chain reactions that are difficult to trace.

If by magic we all set up our dominoes perfectly, so much trouble and suffering would be eliminated overnight. There are still random events and difficulties, but a majority of bad things that happen do so because individuals have neglected their dominoes.

When you have no dominoes down, there are no bad chain reactions. Every aspect of your life is fully integrated – as close as it can be to full alignment with how you want to be in that area of your life. It’s full integration, as the opposite of disintegration. All the dominoes are integrated into our circle. This is called integrity. You can probably think of people who have lives like this. You probably have quiet respect for a few people. They’ve set up their dominoes properly.

So, we should set up our dominos. 

Let’s resolve to set up our health domino. We get out and go for a run, it’s going to be our new daily habit. But your husband starts criticizing you for exercising when the house is a mess. He’s not usually this critical, but work has been killing him lately (his work domino is in a bad place). 

You stop running, because you really should take care of the house. 

Your husband’s career domino just knocked your health domino over before you even got it set up.

Or maybe you want to do more work on a passion project, to set up your purpose domino – but your friend who never found their purpose talks you down and convinces you that it’s a waste of time. Your friend’s domino just knocked over yours.

The problem: our dominos are surrounded by everyone else’s.

It’s not just a case of putting our oxygen mask on first: we have to put on our oxygen mask while many other people are trying to yank the oxygen mask out of your hands. Most of these people aren’t malicious, they just have their own domino problems, and are looking to justify them. There’s nothing that makes a person feel better about their toppled dominoes than convincing someone else it’s impossible to set the dominoes back up.

But what about all those big dominoes that belong to us all?

There are big dominoes, giant dominoes out beyond out little ring. We might try to set them up without setting our own circles up, but that’s not a great idea, for two reasons:

First, these big dominos are big for a reason. Everyone else’s dominoes are buffeting them at all times – A lot of little dominoes can tip over one of the big dominoes, and they’re the end of some very long chain reactions. They’re heavy, ponderous things, and some of them have been down since the beginning of time. When we abandon our circle of dominoes to try and put up a big domino, we’re fighting an almost impossibly difficult war.

We’ve set a few of these dominoes, through intense effort on the part of generations of people. We’re knocking down poverty rates at an amazing rate around the world. Not many wars are fought any more, and the ones that are are less lethal. These are huge victories.

Maybe you’d like to fix one of these big dominoes yourself: you’d feel accomplishment, you’d feel less powerless, you’d feel like you’re worth something. Fair enough.

But let’s say you’re very dedicated and very intelligent, and you rally the troops to actually set up one of these dominoes. Great! Of course, it’s difficult to tell how heavy they are until you’re lifting them, and they’re awkwardly shaped and eroded from years of being flat on the ground. None of these dominoes are easy or straightforward to fix, even with unlimited funding and time.

We don’t know how to make them stand up.

If you try and fail at standing your own dominoes up, they cause small chain reactions and relatively tiny problems. If you try and fail to set a big domino up, it might fall over, crushing a lot of other dominoes in its path.

Because big things are hard to fix. Often an attempted cure doesn’t fix the problem, and causes catastrophic new problems. Putting bounties on cobras just leads to cobra farms.

Then what do we do?

But hold on – big dominoes are on their sides, big dominoes do fall. Are we just supposed to ignore them? What do we do with the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling that someone should DO something?

We could get together in a mob. That’s one way. Mobs rarely do any good and routinely do a lot of bad, but we won’t feel powerless.

If we smash up enough people’s dominoes in our anger, we’ll feel better. We’ll feel right. We’ll feel like we’ve done something.

“Get involved”

We could post impotently on social media about the evils in the world, about how frustrated/angry/powerless we feel. Look at those huge dominoes. Why doesn’t someone do something about the dominoes?

Posting on social media helps us feel less powerless, and we’ll get a dozen of our friends cheering us on.

The problem: it’s cheap virtue. “Bad situation is bad!” will get everyone nodding along with you, and you’ll feel good and virtuous and socially responsible.

But you know the truth, if you’ll admit it: your finely crafted post didn’t one bit of good. You feel virtuous because people will tell you you’re virtuous, but in truth all this focused outrage didn’t set up one single domino in your life, or anyone else’s.

The path forward, as I see it

If you get good enough at setting up your dominoes, people will notice. People will start to respect you. You’ll have more responsibility, and more dominoes to keep standing. Your circle will grow.

To they who have much, much will be given. If you can learn to set up your own dominoes, you’ll have influence over more.

You’ll actually do some good in your life. When the time comes to write your eulogy, they won’t have to say “He was a passionate advocate” euphemistically saying “he was angry and posted on social media a lot”.

If you get good enough at setting up your dominoes, you might actually start to have influence over the bigger dominoes. You’ll start to have resources and relationships that give you access to even more broken and toppled dominoes.

It’s the only way forward, the only way that you could actually make a difference when facing huge problems in our world. It’s actually harder than taking on great evils directly, because you have to be honest about your own failures, your own inadequacies and blind spots.

The next time that you feel an impulse to DO SOMETHING about a terrible thing happening in our world, stop for a moment. Look at the dominoes of your life. How are you morally failing? What dominoes do you need to set up?

Are you worried to death about someone else’s failings while your marriage is falling apart?

Are you typing angrily about the sins of the world when your house is a wreck, dishes unwashed in the sink?

If you can’t take care of yourself, if you can’t manage your own dominoes, why do you think you can manager bigger, infinitely more complex dominoes?

What dominoes are falling down in your own community that you’re willfully turning a blind eye to?

What dominoes are falling over in the lives of those you love that you’re not lifting a finger to address?

Look around you for a moment. Look at the scattered mess of your life. Look at the small failures and sins and selfish choices you make on a daily basis.

Attend to the domino in your eye.