The Universe Sandbox

By Nathan Shambhala

Why are we here? Out of 13.8 billion years and across 93 billion light-years of space, you and I exist right here, right now. The mere odds of each of us existing today are not equivalent to choosing just one single atom out of all of the atoms in our galaxy, but to choose one atom out of 20,000 galaxies’ worth of atoms! To defy such extraordinary odds is fascinating as it is mysterious and the reason for this has been pondered by scientists, philosophers, and spiritual gurus alike for as long as we can trace the history of humanity only for their conclusions to remain broad and obscure as the most complicated inner-workings of the universe itself. If you aren’t feeling special yet, on top of those insane odds, you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to live through the most technologically advanced time in history at the same time as the Earth is swept across by one of the most major, widespread viruses in history: COVID-19. Alarming, frightening, and eye-opening. Despite this coronavirus (COVID-19 being the scientific nomenclature for the strain) terrorizing the world for the past two years, many have been able to dodge the wake that the insidious virus makes by following general spread prevention protocol, leaving them with a slightly more manageable problem, what to do with this surplus of quarantine free-time? While the average person doesn’t sit around thinking about the inner workings of the universe or the sole meaning of life, I know many of us “couch philosophers” have contemplated what we will choose to do this week as we sit in our lonely homes, browsing the latest Netflix and Disney Plus shows, family size bag of potato chips on standby. I was definitely one to fall into this trap of endless days and nights of binging, eating, and laying around waiting for the next day to rinse and repeat, but something about this lifestyle didn’t sit well with me. I felt that I was missing out on something, like there was a shadow of guilt creeping up behind me, about to tap me on the shoulder and yell at me, “you fool!” at any given moment that I was enjoying said free time.

Like many of our most defining attributes, I was able to trace this strange feeling back to my childhood. Growing up, I had always been mentally active as most children were, acting out lightsaber duels with friends and imagining my WWE and superhero action figures coming to life and battling in epic crossovers. My imagination was further enriched by long conversations with my Dad, a naturally curious person like myself, who spent hours outside with me looking at the stars and talking about the most interesting ideas in science. My awed young mind could hardly contain itself after hearing about how the light from each star in the sky was light created all the way back when the dinosaurs grazed the earth, only reaching our eyes millions of years later. These eclectic concepts are what first introduced me to how much there is to this spectacular universe than what’s on the surface, but also caused me to feel different compared to my peers at an early age. I first noticed this when I met one of my closest friends, even to this day, with whom I had quite literally bumped heads with during one Kindergarten recess. His name was Robert. Robert and I - having lived only two blocks from each other and our older sisters coincidentally being friends before we met - had fewer reasons not to hang out than reasons for the convenience of hanging, which is why I suppose we became so tight so quickly. We both liked video games, were part of the same group of friends, and played baseball in our city's little league together, but I noticed that much of the time the things I thought, said, and did, wouldn’t usually resonate well with him. Being so young, I saw this as something I had to change in myself, so I began “dumbing myself down” in an effort to alleviate some of this “off feeling.” “Girls like it when you make fun of them,” he advised one day as he went up to a few of our female classmates to prove his theory, only to be met with a bunch of disturbed and confused looks. “See,” he returned with a grin, “it totally got their attention!” These shenanigans and many similar ones such as circling around a basketball pole and rubbing their butts against it, shouting, “Big Red Bouncy Balls,” while marching around the playground, and tying their shirts up to resemble a females undergarments, to name a few, did not make much sense to me, but as the saying goes, “monkey see, monkey do,” so embarrassing as it was, I saw no other reason not to partake in some (but certainly not all, god forbid) of these activities. While I would think about studying black holes and inventing technology to cure the biggest concern for my third-grade self - my Dad’s lactose intolerance, which if you knew, you would be equally eager to cure - I never felt comfortable with sharing these aspirations with my friends, as they seemed to have very different things on their minds.

It wasn’t until 5th grade, the morning of the last day of school until Spring break, that I caught a glimpse of a side of the world that I sometimes wish I’d never known. Having a moderately sized family with two younger siblings and an older sister in middle school, we would all play games together around the house and were generally “in the know” when it came to knowing what was going on in each other's lives, at least to the basic extent that a young child would understand. I knew that my youngest sister was making her first friends in her 1st-grade class, that my younger brother was enjoying one of my previous teachers in his 3rd-grade class, and that my older sister was trying her best to get by in the great, big, complicated 7th-grade middle school class. But one early, seemingly ordinary, morning - one just as plain and unique as any other with the warm comfort of my sheets covering my head from the dull, grey-blue light creeping through my closed blinds - my parents woke me up with something that would change the way I see the world forever. “Your sister is cutting herself,” my dad uttered with a tremor in his voice like I’d never heard before, “We found marks on her wrist that she said she made last night.” “We thought that you were old enough to know, but don’t tell the younger ones,” my mom added with even more emotion held back in her throat. I felt a whirlpool of unfamiliar emotions. That’s as much as I can remember clearly from the exchange, as the rest is a blur. It was only until recently that I realized that was the same day I was sent to the principal's office for getting into the one physical fight I ever got into with a friend who had taken my juice box at lunch, which was not too uncommon for a friend to do to another when they didn’t have one themselves. Many of my thoughts from the following years are unclear to me looking back to that time, as I certainly remember trying to wrap my head around what I was told and what it meant, as well as worrying about the possibility of the most unmentionable, however much of it seems to be jumbled together and distorted, or forgotten entirely, which looking back, I believe must have been my mind’s way of automatically coping with it. But one thing that I thought about that is still clear as day is that “I had to be strong for my family.” So, with the doubtlessness and naive bravery of a child, I took it as my responsibility to be the pillar holding up my parents and older sister as they battled the infamous battle of mental illness. Perhaps this is a long-lost aspect of the guilt I felt over quarantine, that I was not doing enough.

 While I was acting as the young sprout of hope and the loyal shoulder to cry on at home, moving through middle school I began to care less and less about my academics, falling severely behind on many of my assignments and ultimately struggling to keep a passing grade in some classes. I did pay attention in classes where the teachers actively engaged with their students and genuinely did enjoy most of my science classes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t see any use in filling out pages of repetitive math problems or memorizing all the conjugations and vocabulary that my Spanish teachers required of me. To me, it was a total and utter waste of my time, which I would rather spend engaging in my recently discovered passion for music, learning how to play little guitar riffs and licks off the magic of YouTube tutorials. Having my biggest inspiration be Eddie Van Halen, proclaimed to be the best guitarist to ever live by much of the rock and roll world, with my determination to someday play like that legend, I would play hours upon hours a day after coming home from school, sometimes playing all the way through the night until my fingers would bleed from the rough metal strings. By the end of my freshman year of high school, I was able to play just about any song that I had wanted to. While this was something I would be legitimately proud of myself for, I had already habitualized the idea of keeping to myself since my experiences in early elementary school.

Other than being known as the guy who always had a smile on his face across my peers and friend group, as people started to acknowledge their educational futures more, it became obvious that I, on the other hand, was not someone who seemed to care about getting good grades for the sake of getting into a “good college.” It became somewhat of a running joke to blurt out, “So Nate, what homework do you have to finish for next class?” during our lunch breaks, which to be real, was generally a valid question. It was almost predetermined that I wouldn’t have the homework ready by the given due date, or sometimes ever for that matter, and the most damaging part is that I believed it just as much as they did. The one thing that I did take pride in was my guitar playing, which I began showcasing on my Instagram as a way to share a passionate side of myself that most people never saw. Robert, however, had something less than supportive to say about these posts. “Do you actually think anyone cares?” he whined in a condescending tone, to which I responded optimistically and humorously with, “Honestly, if it made just one person excited in addition to myself, that's all that matters to me, and I already know it makes my Grandpa happy!” Robert’s attitude grew more and more pessimistic towards me as the years went on, but I knew that was “just how he was,” so I never bothered to mind it.

Come mid-sophomore year, I met a quite exuberant but sweet, warm-hearted girl, Belle, who I had previously met once, and ironically never again since, having one of my first naturally flowing conversations with as a young 6th grader at an end of year pool party. When I would kick it with Belle - having moved countries multiple times through her childhood, eventually falling into a grade one year higher than usual for her age - it seemed as if we had an instant and natural connection and openness, which I assume was due to our commonalities in deviation from the societal meta. Although we were quite opposite people on the surface, me being a happy-go-lucky, carefree kind of guy and her being a total book-smart, highly organized student taking multiple AP courses, we were able to blissfully talk about and listen to whatever was on each other's minds and eventually started dating. Robert, of course, did not approve of this, but I didn’t mind his unreasonable opinions as they got more and more irrelevant to the version of reality I was living.

Apart from my newfound friend, school continued to weigh heavily on my consciousness and as my older sister’s mental health was improving, at-home life still modulated in stability over the months. Nonetheless, I continued to try my best and keep interested in the topics that caught my attention, namely English and science. English, specifically, piqued my interest as I began to realize that it is not just words and grammar, or long novels and poems that consist of words and grammar that we have to timestakingly analyze and annotate, but alternatively that English was a tool to transmit and receive the most complicated ideas that one’s brain can fathom, all through the use of a pencil and paper. The concepts of English class then became astonishing, as I would feel the same passion I get playing my guitar as I would using these concepts in my own English papers and assignments. Belle, being the academic that she is, was a huge supporter of this as my interests in my English class grew throughout the next year. Her open support, however, felt much like a double-ended sword, as my new successes were often credited to “my smart girlfriend” and my friends refused to believe that she didn’t do the work for me, as my reputation of being solely a slacker was fortified by that point. It somewhat frustrated me, but still, the greatest part of me believed it. “All I did was have fun writing my thoughts, I don’t deserve the credit anyway,” I’d think to myself, knowing I was nothing of an academic.

Then Covid hit. I was genuinely relieved. I was relieved to get away from school, I was excited to spend more time with Belle, and I was ready to sit back and relax, riding the wave of confusion that Covid left behind in its chaos. This is when I started to feel that strange quarantine guilt creeping up on me. My life seemed to be on overdrive for the past several years, but with my sister’s health improving, and passing classes over quarantine being a breeze, there was plenty of time to sit around and contentedly do nothing for several hours on end. One thing I did find exciting was the science of psychology, spending a considerable amount of my surplus time researching different concepts on my own time, as the idea of learning about the “human operating system” was fascinating to me like it triggered my scientific imagination from my past. When senior year came around, naturally, I enrolled myself in the school's psychology class. Excited to study an academic subject that I had previously developed a personal, seeking-based connection with, I had more inclination to ask questions to develop an even deeper understanding of anything that piqued my interest. On top of that, I was able to feed my hunger to learn even more so without the self-perceived judgments I’d allow myself to be affected by if I was in person. Despite the class being an AP course, I ended up looking forward to each class, excited to see what kind of interesting concepts we would discuss next, and even ended up earning an above satisfactory level grade on the AP test at the end of the year. But even then, with the world being on a sort of valid, justified pause, I was starting to feel unsatisfied with myself, like I had a secret existential responsibility.

I couldn’t figure out where or why this feeling was persisting until one day when Belle and I went out to the local pool. She had noticed that I was feeling particularly off and decided to address it. I had gotten into an argument with my dad earlier in the day about the number of hours I put in at work so she started there. I was quick to defend him saying that he’s kind of right and that I could be doing better with that but that’s when she stopped me. “Nathan, you are too hard on yourself,” she lectured sternly, “you do so much for your family and they never acknowledge it.” She began getting more emotional as she spoke, “You have been through so many painful things and nobody seems to acknowledge that. You have lived your whole life with a responsibility that you never had a choice in but you took it upon yourself to be the best brother and son you could be despite what you sacrificed. You had your childhood stolen from you in 5th grade, yet that didn’t stop you from continuing to grow into such a well-rounded young man.” These were words I’d never heard before, yet spoke to me like they were words I’d always needed to hear. She was absolutely right, even I had forgotten where I had come from and what I had been through to be the person I am today. Before the isolation that quarantine gave me, I was only able to reflect on what the outside world - unknowing of my complicated past - had judged me as, taking that biased judgment as a reasonable definition of my own character. Humbly recognizing these presumptions as logical in the past, I finally acknowledged who I truly am and what makes me that person. It felt like my eyes had opened to see the world for what it really is for the first time.

I went home that day confused but enlightened. “She's right,” I thought to myself. My life had been molded in hardships, and getting through those hardships made me the person I am today. But within the isolation of my self from the energy-draining world, I was able to realize that the only thing visible to those around me was what I put out to the world, therefore, friends were only able to see my negligence to school, it made perfect sense that they would get the wrong idea of me, and the worst part is, I was basing my actions around complying to their expectations. Even the next morning, sitting quietly on my familiar bed, with the cold blue light of dawn shining through my blinds, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had been living a life that I believed was what a normal life would be like while forgetting about the fact that I was not a normal kid. My version of a normal kid was someone whose life consisted of the most standard, simple, idealistic life: play make-believe, rumble with siblings, go to school, get good grades, get a job and have a family. While this works as a standard guideline to a normal life, I’d found that my life was not so simple, and in fact, drifted far from normalcy starting in the 5th grade. And as it had always been, it was up to me to make what I wanted out of the life I was given. I worked for the next several months in my isolation to put together the pieces of my life, now that I could see it for how it was without the external stimulus of the fault-finding world clogging up my cognitive pathways.

With so much free time to think, I began picking apart every aspect of my life. What have I been doing these past few years and what do I want to do? I didn’t quite know the answer to this question yet, but I definitely knew what I had not been doing: school. There was only one single thing that I was expected to do by every sophisticated member of society and it was to do my school work. Then what the hell was I thinking there was no point in doing school? Diving into the philosophical idea that all things exist for a reason, and most importantly that each of those things is what you make of it, I realized that the point in doing school was the same point in me going through the hardships of my past or finding passion in English or music, to make me a more well-rounded person. Maybe I wouldn’t use the quadratic formula ever again but what if I found passion in a field that did require me to use it? And even if I didn’t, all aspects of success require the discipline that doing seemingly mundane tasks trains you for. I was having a bit of a crisis, having wasted so many years of school with such a closed mindset to learning but eventually decided that while school was important, flunking out the first three years of high school was going to kill my chances of going to any high tier college so I might as well just enjoy the rest of my ever-receding childhood during senior year and senior summer while trying my best to do my best continuing to find interest in education from this new perspective while I was required to spend time on it anyway. I often wonder whether I would have come to these conclusions without the help of quarantine separating me from the lingering, negative connotation that school carries among the youth of our society, or if I would continue to be trapped in the box that's walls look like mirrors, taking my efforts in a perpetual loop that leads to nowhere beyond its origin. For the sake of our future generations, I forlornly hope for the former to be the truth, but I am grateful to have made this discovery myself in one form or another.

Next, I thought about what I wanted to do. “Well if the outside world is only made up of what I put into it, why don't I put everything I’ve got into it and set my goals as high as the sun,” I thought optimistically. I had proven what I could do with myself time and time again through applying my passion and dedication to what, or who, I love, so who’s to say I can achieve whatever goals I put out for myself, given that same passion? While it was not easy for me to be there for my parents when I knew being there meant thinking about coming home from school one day to my worst nightmares on a consistent basis, I was passionate about supporting the ones I love to the best of my ability, and that's what carried me forward through the most emotionally disturbing times in my life. Having the time that quarantine gave me to reflect, I now know that what I want in life will only be achievable through applying that same passion and using it to continue to learn and grow as an academic, keeping focused on my work, and breaking my bad habits of education that I’ve formed in the past as a barrier to keep myself intact in this relentless world. Unfortunately, mentioning this new mindset to my “closest friend,” Robert, was only met with a low-key depressing, “dude, it’s sooo annoying when you talk about things you're interested in.” By this time, I was quite done with my “best friend” being the least supportive person in my life.

But despite these discoveries, my greatest challenge yet was still ahead of me. To accomplish the goals I had set for myself, I would have to become the academic I had always been afraid to be during these next two years of college. I will no longer have the strength of my number one supporter, Belle, who knew the ins and outs of managing grades and assignments, as she will be schooling at UCSB to pursue her own dreams and aspirations, and I will be forced to take on this beast of an education system alone. As scary as this is, I know that I have been through scarier. I know that I deserve it for myself to put in all the willpower I’ve gained over the years to make my future exactly what I want it to be, and I am sure that if I don't put in everything I have, I will be wondering, “what if,'' for the rest of my life. As improbable beings in an improbable universe, we are cast into these unlikely roles of pain and confusion, and times will come that make you feel that you are less than equipped to act in them. But as Shakespeare puts it, “All the world's a stage” and we are the directors. Our purpose is what we desire it to be, and only we have the true power to decide that. The time spent in isolation from this draining, judgemental society let me see that and now I make my own mark and write my own story. The world is what you make of it. The Universe is my sandbox.