Undergraduate / 'My Battle with Reality (lol)' - Stanford Supplemental Essay - Intellectual Vitality [6]

Prompt: Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. elaborate on an experience or idea important to your intellectual development.

What is reality? I'll be the first to admit that I don't have a clue.

There were times when I'd muse over that question in the shower until a long time after my fingers pruned and gallons of water were unintentionally wasted. I'd ponder while staring into a fire until my eyes would sting from the ash and the logs were reduced to embers. Maybe life is an illusion, I would think. Or perhaps we are puppets. Did I have free will at all? Or were my actions instead pre-defined? Does matter make up our minds, or do our minds make up matter? And on and on my thoughts would go. Instead of answers I would get more questions, and if brains could feel then mine would've probably been in severe pain. My mom would tell me to stop thinking so much, but I couldn't. I had to delve further. I read about different religions and philosophies to find my answer, from Christianity to Buddhism to Absurdism. I even tried meditation, although at the time I was probably too restless to make it work. When I took physics my junior year, I thought science would finally give me the answer I sought, but instead it further perplexed my world-view. I was shocked to discover that electrons alter their behavior by simply being observed, and that two particles can resonate in sync over infinite distances. The world's rules were even less solid than I thought. After school, I would go investigate physics further on Youtube. I would find amazing demonstrations of ferrofluid structures, alien-like non-Newtonian substances dancing on sub-woofers, and sand particles forming turtle shell-like geometric patterns when exposed to high frequencies. I was enchanted; I even tried playing my saxophone to some sand on a plate in a desperate effort to charm the particles into performing the last phenomena for myself. It didn't work like I'd hoped.

Will I ever find my answer? Maybe not, but I'll keep looking. In hindsight my search gave me tremendous respect for nature and life, and what's more important than that?

I feel like the ending needs work. Thoughts? will return favor