Meet Katharine. She is a tall, elegant intern in the office of a United States senator. She is buttoned in a sleek black business suit, perched on formidable tan high heels, and peppered with the most adorable freckles. She is humbly professional, unassumingly kind, and sparklingly sociable. In fact, Katharine’s only perceivable flaw is a frizzy lock of hair that she missed while flat ironing this morning. Oh, and she’s only eighteen.

I met Katharine last month while vacationing in Washington D.C.. A friend of a friend works for Senator Levin’s office and offered to set my travel buddies and I up on a tour with “his best intern.” Not surprisingly, it was Katharine. Katharine is one of those people who makes me wonder if goodness is chromosomal, if there is an elusive gene that makes an individual unendingly positive—the Henrietta Lacks of cheeriness. She’s someone that I want to hate for being so unattainably put together but is so delightfully charming I simply can’t find the heart to. However, the best thing that Katharine is is curious.

After only six days on the job, Katharine was knowledgeable enough to cart us deftly through the catacombs of our nation’s Capital and rattle off enough trivia to convince us that the building had no more secrets left to hold. However, upon entering the old Senate chambers, Katharine turned to us and whispered, “I always love asking the attendants their favorite stories. Watch.” She then turned to the red-coated attendant and did just that, resulting in a fascinating tale of slavery, a comatose senator, and a bloodying beating with a cane. And all the while, Katharine’s expression was as eager and enamored as our own.

Now, having painted such a glowing portrait of Katharine, I have a seemingly conceited confession to make: Katharine and I are not so different. I don’t claim to be as polished or wholesome as her, but I am very much a goody-two-shoes and feed my perfectionism whenever possible. I have the classroom hand of a Sorcerer’s Stone Hermione Granger and have accrued an impressive stash of certificates, trophies, and medals in my lifetime. However, I noticed during our Capitol tour that I do not have the same earnest curiosity as Katharine. In fact, I know that if an 18-year-old Gabe was giving that tour, there is no chance he would have relinquished even a single opportunity to display his prowess to some chump in a red tour guide jacket. (Also, I still severely question the patriotism of ever trusting anyone in a red coat!)

But the need to always appear intellectually superior actually stifles intellect; when we view ourselves as an expert, we leave no room to learn. In her creative writing courses, Professor Rienstra talks about the danger of “indulging one’s own writerly fabulosity,” the literary equivalent of chuckling heartily at all of one’s own jokes. However this warning applies also to the great book of life itself. Too often we walk around our daily worlds indulging our own fabulosity—Instagramming our homemade waffle breakfast, winning as many points for Gryffindor as possible in our classes, repeatedly reciting our exaggerated anecdote about that one thing that happened to us today that was so funny. However, self-absorption is, theoretically, the exact opposite of growth.

I’m realizing that curiosity, like goodness and faithfulness, is a virtue and that a virtuous person is one who seeks to absorb life from those around them. A genuinely curious individual is one who asks their parents what they struggled with right out of college or talks with their grandma about life during the Great Depression or takes their professor out to lunch to discuss nuclear non-proliferation or stops a Czech person on the streets of Prague to ask their favorite place in the city or prompts a street fair artist to describe the inspiration for their painting of a red-galoshed child romping through a puddle. Blessed are the curious, for they will inherit the wonders around them.

So, in conclusion, I kind of hate Katharine. She’s a better Hermione than I am (frizzy hair and all) and will probably be voting on tax reforms in the Senate before I even figure out how to do my taxes. However, I do owe Katharine for a couple things: first, an exemplary tour of our nation’s Capitol—did you know that there’s even a barber shop in the Capitol building?—and second, a reminder that curiosity is not weakness. Instead, it is the only way to strengthen our grip on the truths of life and indulge in the full fabulosity of the world around us.

Gabe Gunnink

Gabe Gunnink (’14) lives in Seattle, where he works for a European travel company and gawks at the landscapes and skylines surrounding him. In his free time, he enjoys practicing Portuguese under his breath on city buses, running far enough to justify eating an entire pan of cinnamon rolls, and faithfully implementing Oxford commas.