Wrestling with God

Chapter 1 - Humility and Whole-Picture-ism

"[Astronomer Fritz] Zwicky calculated that the galaxies were moving far too fast and when he worked it backward from the velocity, he realized that the mass in the Coma cluster must be around 40 times greater than the mass gained from the calculation based on its luminosity. So he dubbed this invisible mass-producing stuff dunkle materie – dark matter...

Dark matter was just the beginning of the 'missing stuff' mystery that has been perplexing physicists. An even bigger problem comes from dark energy – a type of energy that fills space and is the cause of the expansion of the universe. We know next to nothing about it, yet it accounts for about 68.3% of our entire universe (with dark matter, 26.8%, and normal matter, 4.9%, making up the rest). We know even less about it than we do about dark matter."(1)

~~

"This cup of yours tastes holy

But a brush with the devil can clear your mind"

-Mumford & Sons(2)

~~

I started playing basketball at a young age and fell in love with the sport quickly. As mentioned in the previous chapter, I spent many hours between the ages of eight and eighteen practicing the sport, often alone.

I was a Denver Nuggets fan, and hated Kobe Bryant because of the way he dismantled my home team in the 2009 NBA Western Conference Finals.* But as I played into high school and started taking a more methodical, studied approach to the game, it wasn't long before I looked up to Kobe Bryant more than any other player. I recognized the near-perfection of his fundamentals beneath the more flashy, highlight-creating parts of his game. I read story after story of how those fundamentals were created and improved upon, with Bryant working obsessively and tirelessly. Literally, tirelessly – he would get three to four hours of sleep a night. In a book he released describing his play style and mentality, he put it bluntly: "I wasn't willing to sacrifice my game, but I also wasn't willing to sacrifice my family time. So I decided to sacrifice sleep, and that was that."(3)

* Many of my most negative childhood memories were related to my favorite sports teams losing: I was hurt when the Nuggets missed the NBA Finals in 2009, was stupefied when they were upset in the first round of the 2013 playoffs as Steph Curry began shooting threes from previously unthought-of-distances, and gave up my diehard dedication to Denver sports teams altogether when the Broncos lost the 2014 Super Bowl to the Seahawks, 43-8. This is a testament both to the general privilege of my upbringing (when sports events were among the most traumatic events of my childhood) and to the unhealthy level of my competitive nature. We all have things to work on. 

I began trying to play just like Kobe. Nevermind that I was 5'9", 160 pounds, and white – besides the ability to dunk, I truly believed that I could play like Kobe.£ And I was determined to make it to the NBA one day. I was an above-average player in middle school. By high school, my main motivation for going to class was that I would have practice or a game at the end of the day. But somehow by high school I had slipped into the middle of the pack of other players. This added greatly to my frustration as an already angsty teenager.

£ One of y favorite mantras at the time was, "What one man can do another can do." This line may be remembered from Anthony Hopkins' character in The Edge (1997), but I read it in a short story and very much took it to heart. I tried to imitate Kobe's sleep habits, for instance...for a couple years, I was not a fun person to be around. Just ask my wife.