Why? Because it's there.

This summer has been busy--after finishing the school year, I did two and a half weeks working at BYU's French Camp for high school students. As that was ending, I started the three grad classes that are taking up the bulk of my summer. I was looking forward to being a full-time student again for these eight weeks of classes. Completing nine grad credits in this amount of time, though, has also been immensely difficult. The work load and seat time is high, and I have found myself stretched and stressed.

Tonight, a friend asked me why I wanted to do grad school--the second time I've been asked this question in as many weeks. I gave the same answer tonight, the most simple one: "Because I haven't learned enough."

After, when I was driving home, I put on a podcast that turned out to be an episode of the TED Radio Hour called "To The Edge." The different segments of the podcast are posted here--interviews with a man who has walked to the North Pole, with a cave explorer whose expeditions can be over a month deep underground, a woman who has rowed alone across oceans, and a high-wire artist who crossed between the World Trade Center on a thin cable. The host kept referring to a famous interview with George Mallory. When asked why summit Mount Everest, Mallory simply answered, "Because it's there."

The podcast episode had such amazing stories: people, regular people, who have pushed themselves because for curiosity and for the joy of it. They reflected on how hard their pursuits were--and, in turn, that the harder the challenge, the greater the accomplishment of completing it. I found the stories so comforting and (though it is trite to say) inspirational. The summits and finish lines were reached, and because of that, lives were changed. Life was made better.