An Enduring Effort: Learning to Look for the Best in Things
By: Abbee (Elwell) Davidson
Hillsdale is the relentless confrontation with the highest ideals and your deepest flaws. It’s a strange experience, reading the greatest thinkers in the afternoon and then failing your teammates in the evening. For a time, I thought the conversation we enjoyed with the Western canon’s best and brightest lifted our spirits only for us to fall face flat on the ground.
My Hillsdale experience didn’t start that way. When I was a freshman, I attended Dr. Arnn’s dessert reception for students who hadn’t keeled over, academically, in their first semester. I had briskly walked over from Mossey, leaving Helen and Menelaus on a table in heaven. I couldn’t figure Helen out. Dr. Fredericks had asked us to write about her, and so I assumed there must be some coherent interpretation of her story out there in the ether. My glaring at the skies had gotten me nowhere, and so I stomped off to Broadlawn, where I was supposed to be a member of the student body who was “successful.”
I had the privilege of finding myself next to Dr. Wales, and so I asked him what the purpose of an English paper was. As a math major, I saw it as a sort of extrapolation of data points—the author only gave us so much data about a character, and a paper was supposed to figure out the “line of best fit” that connected all those data points into one comprehensible, consistent understanding. Dr. Wales leaned forward, crossed his arms, and launched into a discourse on liberal education, meditating on how it attunes and sensitizes its students to the human condition that we might be free to live well.
A year and a half later, I stared at those words in my journal. Time and again after that dessert reception, I had revisited my summary of Dr. Wales’ insights to spur a paper into motion or contextualize a hefty reading assignment. But after my first day in Congresswoman M’s office, those words were empty vessels.
Earlier that morning, the white marble of Capitol Hill glared back at me for the first time, my eyes barely able to take it all in. I stood on the corner of Independence and New Jersey, waiting for my supervisor to find me. Ben strolled forward—“Abbee? Come this way.” As we stood in line to print my Capitol ID, Ben didn’t ask me any questions. As a Midwesterner with a certificate in Amiable Small Talk, I was thrown off that he didn’t initiate a conversation. Eventually, I summoned the courage to chat, and daily building on that first exchange, we formed a reliance upon each other that proved essential later.
When I first walked into Cannon House Office Building, Room 205, I faced an empty chair. I turned to meet the people who I hoped would become my mentors and friends, but when I did, not a single person looked up, no one greeted me, no one introduced themselves. I sat down at my “workspace.” (Ben said it was too small to be called a desk.) The other intern avoided my smile and hunched over his laptop. When I asked Dana, the legislative assistant, for information I could only get from her, she rolled her eyes and didn’t send me the information.
How could I do my job well with people who acted like I didn’t exist? How could I become a part of a community with people who mocked me when I tried to do what they had asked?
That night, I resented my time at Hillsdale. I felt the College had led me astray, that it had conditioned me to be naïve and unprepared to live in the real world.
I remembered how grateful I was as a freshman to meet characters who suffered but then saw reality more clearly. I looked back into my journal, to the entries that exclaimed the surpassing worth of knowing reality better, and I felt foolish. That girl had no idea what she was talking about.
But now, right now, I hope I do.
After those first few weeks in D.C., I chose to listen, more than I ever had. When I smiled, it wasn’t mere muscle memory; I was determined to smile. When I developed concerns about how the staff treated constituents, I raised the issue with my supervisor, Ben. On the patio of the Library of Congress, I explained to him what I thought was wrong: “If people have souls, Ben, then there’s a certain way we should always treat them. If people have some touch with something divine, with something that’s infinite, there’s a standard of care we should not fail.” Ben leaned forward, nodded, and said, “I’m not sure I believe in souls, but I do think you’re right.” After our discussion, Ben was emboldened to go to his own boss and gently raise his concerns (I’ve been told that the staff respect the constituents much more now.)
In that tough time, I started to pay attention to people differently. What did Dana truly desire when she mocked me? Respect. What did Gary? Eagerness to learn. What did Stevie? Laughter at her jokes. I was being attuned to the human condition.
The night before I left D.C., Dana looped me into an inside joke, Stevie offered me a drink, and we all laughed together.
These days, I’m wife to the smart, sweet and silly Andrew Davidson and a graduate student of applied statistics at William & Mary. Sometimes, I feel like I am living a completely different life, with only the same first name to connect me to my past. Other times, I crank up the volume to the same old songs, and I see my life as a new album building on all the others. When I start to sink back to that strange regret, a feeling of resentment for tasting sweetness only to be swept away, Andrew reminds me of God’s faithfulness in D.C., and at Hillsdale, and in my family—throughout my whole life. He will not abandon yet those who abide.
I still fail every day, but I have not given up. Hillsdale embraced me into the enduring effort to look at the best of things, to recognize how far I am from it. Yet in my observation of that distance, in that decision to orient my soul towards it, and in my attempts to reach goodness, I get a little closer, day by day, by the grace of God.
