The other night, the realization of how finite certain moments are hit me while sitting outside the Chapman University radio booth at three in the morning. It was one of those moments where even though the world seems like it’s crashing down around your ears, simultaneously everything is beginning to make sense. All of the swirling worries and anxieties that have built up after six weeks of being in a completely new environment—stood still. It was that moment that I could make out the dust particles in the sparse rec-room light and acknowledge their simplicity in an overly-complicated world. Dust particles, you see, float aimlessly in space—much like college students. It was then explained to me how college is a lot like a nebula.
I had heard going to college be equated to space before: you’re in a new environment completely unfamiliar to you, contact with “home base” is spare and treasured, and there’s a lot of scary, well, anythings that could be out there. But eventually you chart a new map and land on another planet, sometimes you even find other intelligent life, and you build a home. This is only half-true. What this analogy doesn’t offer you is the terror that is navigating on your own. The difference with being in a nebula is that it’s this ball of noxious gas and electricity; all of your spaceship’s instruments go bonkers and even if you try to look out the porthole, all you see is these equally dazzling and blinding displays of color. You can still hail ground control, but they’re not there with you in the nebula, they can’t give you the guidance you need, and they can’t let you know when you’re going to smack into another spaceship at full-force.
Entering the nebula of university living is something no spaceship is ready for, and if they claim they are, either they’re lying to you or to themselves. It’s hard. And when two spaceships enter together, it’s any astrologer’s guess where they’ll end up. You could go in one end and come neatly out the other side. You could go in and come out the same way you entered. You could make hard lefts and hard rights, ups and downs, and all the while there are other spaceships in the same nebula. You could just as well travel side-by-side never interacting, or, you could slam into each other.
I keep returning to this spaceship disaster scenario, because it didn’t occur to me until I took an hour-long impulse drive at 1:30 am down the I-5, hoping to seek some answers from a night-call, that I couldn’t do anything to prevent such disasters. Of course, there are warning signs: lights and panels flashing and screaming, but when every single panel and button is screaming at once, it can be difficult to focus on one, even if you consider it the most important one. First and foremost however, is checking your life support. No matter what’s happening in that nebula, stepping back and taking a cliché “deep breath” can be very helpful. (Even if that deep breath takes you on the I-5 in the middle of the night). Anything and everything can happen in the nebula, and sometimes you can’t brace for impact until you’re already drifting away from the crash site.
Sitting on a red-leather couch, wrapped in my scarlet cardigan, an indie Panther-class spaceship reminded me that I can’t control everything that happens in the nebula. What I can do is let my responsive emotions be genuine and remember that just because there’s turbulence now, it does in no way negate how pretty the stars looked before we entered the nebula.
