Last week’s rain brought on some crazy circumstances for a house on Gordon built in the 1920s and home to 12 girls. Hurricane Matthew overcrowded our front entryway with rain boots, turned our front yard into a kiddie pool and overwhelmed our house group-text with requests to be driven to and from Grounds from girls who didn’t want to walk a mile in a downpour.
Even though the weather would normally send everyone into a movie watching, couch potato comma, our house somehow became busier. The rain soaked us into a small state of disarray — schedules were interrupted and water was everywhere, including leaking from our ceiling upstairs. Everything was a mess, in need of cleaning, fixing and helping.
Last week took a lot of personal and group effort to keep our lives moving forward. It was a week of action — a week of doing for one another. As I drove two of my housemates to class, wearing my pajamas in a torrential downpour, I realized the rain can be humbling. Like a tiny flood pushing us out of our separate spaces into communal ones, the weather was forcing us to realize we needed help and making us ask for it.
I don’t think asking for help comes naturally or easily for many University students. We are studying here precisely because we are self-sufficient, driven and capable people. We love to give help, but allowing ourselves to accept the help of others is entirely different. To offer help requires generosity, but to accept help requires humility. Why don’t we desire to cultivate humility within ourselves the way we desire to cultivate compassion towards others?
Ironically, the rain was perfectly timed with midterms, a few weeks-long period of focusing on demonstrating our strengths as a student. The circumstances set up a funny comparison of values. Perhaps, as a community, we are losing our ability to see humility as a skill or a virtue. We don’t view it as marketable, or valuable in our student economy.
As a community at U.Va., we seem to be increasingly allergic to weakness. We long for intimacy and realness in our relationships and lives — for people to truly know and love us — but we detest the vulnerability that would bring about the dynamic we want. It reminded me of a New York Times article by David Brooks about eulogy virtues versus résumé virtues.
In college, the world seems obsessed with our résumé virtues — the things we can list on our many applications, boxes we’ve checked off, achievements we’ve gained through our own ingenuity. Eulogy virtues are what they sound like — they are the characteristics central to who we are that will impacted people in such a way that they will be spoken of at our funerals.
Eulogy virtues are harder to value when we’re young, smart, and going places, but I think the impactful, full lives we long for actually have something to do with admitting weakness and allowing something or someone outside of ourselves to help us fill some of the gaps. When we’re too proud to ask or too distracted by other things, we give up all the grace and help that could be offered to us.
I agree with what Brooks wrote in his article, “We all need redemptive assistance from outside.” Our house is almost all dry now, but the doors we opened to air it out are still open. I hope they remain open, because we need other people to see our weaknesses — and for us to see theirs.
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