This was on the back of one of my phone cases that has long since rubbed off. I put it there to remind myself that when I pick up my phone, it better be to do something productive. It didn’t totally work, but I still got a few good things from this quote.
If you really think about that quote, it’s quite impossible. There are too many “everythings” to count, let alone know something about each. And as for “everything about something"? Still unlikely. No field is so narrow as to be completely encompassed by any one mind. I'll fail at this and I'm okay with it. Why? Two reasons.
Every moment of every day has something to teach us. We just need to listen. I was that kid with her nose buried in a book for many years, but I’ve since realized that learning comes in many forms. It disguises itself as conversation with a stranger, hides behind seemingly fruitless Internet surfing, and mingles with the unconscious state which is sleep. By saying that I will learn something about everything, I’m forcing myself to look for these chances and to grab them while I can. If I’m going to do something impossible, I should probably get started pretty darn soon.
The second reason is that life is about the journey, not the destination. Whether or not there actually is a big prize at the end of the road is still up for debate. Until I have an answer, I might as well treat my whole life as the reward. Even in that case, the pursuit of the impossible is the best journey ever, because guess what? You’ll never reach the end.
Even if I never actually reach this crazy goal of mine, this delusion that I actually have a chance drives me to find more efficient ways to synthesize information and learn everything that I possibly can. My friends constantly roll their eyes as I rattle off seemingly random trivia at every opportunity. But to me, there's no greater joy than being able to explain obscure phenomena and recite long poems from memory.
These ideas also translate to other areas of our lives. The more we learn, the better we get at it, and the easier it is. Perhaps most importantly right now, it’s part of why we’re in college. Good jobs and happy endings can come from many places, but we’ve chosen this path for ourselves. Higher education is hard. We worked ourselves into a frenzy getting here, and we’ll do it again to get out. But the way I see it, at the end (for most of us at least), what we’ll really have gained isn’t all the information that we’ve managed to cram into our brains, it’s the education and skills we’ve developed while putting it there. In a conniving sort of way, it all comes back to this: What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
