This is a way to grasp things:
The universe is an immense laboratory where anything can happen. Anything? Not exactly. What will happen must be possible, what is impossible will not happen. I know, it seems tautology, but it is not. Impossible means conflict with possible, and possible means non-exclusive. The Universe is to me the sum of events that produce no conflict, or in other words the sum of possible events.
One can improve this very vague definition by focusing on the word "sum", because the Universe is not only a sum of bananas and galaxies, the Universe is a structure in which you find bananas existing in some galaxies.
So that you can say that the Universe is a structure into which all non-exclusive possible events will happen.
Matter, radiation, life are such events.