Have you ever had the experience of one small event setting off a chain of unrelated events, much like a line of dominos? It’s as if that first rogue occurrence upsets some sort of cosmic balance. This sounds so far-fetched that I’ve dismissed the possibility of this actually happening. It must be my imagination, right? Maybe.

Or maybe not. Take for instance this morning. My oldest son was struggling to get out of the house and onto the school bus, our two dogs were clamoring to get outside, and my youngest son, of course, had to be part of the mass exodus. The trouble was that no one could get out: The door lock was jammed. With time to spare at nil, I grabbed my keys, hoisted the small dog, and urged my son down the basement steps and out the garage door, leaving in our wake the big dog barking and the younger son screaming.

My son made the bus, but a domino effect ensued. My younger son threw a tantrum at the doctor’s office. The jeans that I picked off of the clearance rack at Walmart rang up full price. (“Someone must have just put them on that rack.”) The dog tracked spring dirt in all over the floor I had spent an hour scrubbing last night. [There was just at this very moment a loud, unidentifiable “crash” somewhere in the house.] And to top it off, there was a message from my son’s principal on the answering machine that there is a “problem that we need to discuss” about the vacation request form that I had sent to school this morning.

Granted, none of these incidents are life-shattering or life-threatening, but annoyances have a nasty habit of accumulating and souring a day.

I had a similar type of day in February when I celebrated a milestone birthday. My husband had planned dinner out at an exclusive restaurant, and a babysitter was arranged. Everything was set, and then the weather happened. More precisely, the Blizzard of 2010 happened, dropping several feet of snow on the Northeast and effectively cancelling my birthday celebration. On that day, like today, the more I pouted, the more the universe seemed to lash back, with relatively inconsequential events piling up and up, not unlike the snow that just kept falling and falling.

“How do you break the cycle?” I complained to my husband in February. “How do you make the dominos stop tumbling?”

And he offered the best advice that I’d heard in a long time: You don’t.

He compared being caught in a cycle of discontent to being caught in a rip current in the ocean. And the way out is the same as the National Weather Service’s guidelines for escaping from a rip current:

• Remain calm to conserve energy and think clearly.
• Never fight against the current.
• Think of it like a treadmill that cannot be turned off, which you need to step to the side of.
• Swim out of the current in a direction following the shoreline. When out of the current, swim at an angle--away from the current--towards shore.
• If you are unable to swim out of the rip current, float or calmly tread water. When out of the current, swim towards shore.
• If you are still unable to reach shore, draw attention to yourself by waving your arm and yelling for help.

In other words, relax, float with the current, and when it lets go, swim like mad for the shore. Fighting only exhausts and gains nothing, while actually, ironically, creating more problems. As with a line of falling dominos, when one tries to interfere with the flow, things go helter-skelter, hence the piling up of little events.

So I’m trying this new tactic: When a day starts to sour, I’ll metaphorically float with it. When inconsequentials raise their beasty little heads over and over, I’ll angle my eyes away. When the dominos tip, I’ll graciously step to the side.

Will this work? I’ll let you know after my conversation with the principal. If you see me frantically waving my arms and calling for help, I may need that life preserver after all.