9 possible answers to the question I am always asked at the end of my talks: “why?”
It’s a question I often touch on on this site (see here, here and here for starters!)
Can you give me a tenth reason to add to my armoury?!

1. Why not?
2. It’s fun, or at least it’s fun looking back on it when it’s over
3. There’s a hell of big world out there and I don’t want to limit my experiences and education to the tiny corner I happened to be born in
4. I haven’t yet found a more fulfilling, exciting, worthwhile thing to do with my allocation of days
5. Because I can (in my angry youth I may have added –sotto voce– “and because lots of other people can’t”)
6. Because I can’t do anything else very well
7. To test myself (in my angry youth I may have added -red faced and raging up a hill- “to prove myself to others”) and to enjoy the self-confidence that succeeding develops
8. To encourage young people to chase their own Everests (or perhaps a slightly lower yet less crowded, expensive peak). This is a relatively new addition to my list but an increasingly strong one
9. To feel alive: “Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished…” – Steinbeck