THE SHEER BEAUTY OF THE TOTALLY AVERAGE

The other night I heard John Cleese say, ‘you must have at least a wee little bit of intelligence to recognize that you are not very smart.’  Sorry, it sounded much wittier in his proper British hyper-exaggerated “this is an ex-parrot” voice; I recommend re-reading the line out loud imitating him.

Though he was referencing a few particularly boisterous braggadocio politicians who seem to over-estimate their own brilliance, I personally took it as a twisted backhanded compliment.  The only time I have considered myself near-genius is when I’m standing next to one.  Throughout my life, from a smarts standpoint, I’ve always felt astoundingly average. Certainly, bright enough to hang in there but never in danger of discovering my mug plastered on the cover of Mensa Monthly or Brainiac Digest.

Now before you either start trying to comfort me or point out that I might be overestimating my IQ number, I should say that to me, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being ‘average’. I might be sensitive to this because I have previously gotten into trouble with wording that I thought was positive but was taken as a negative. Years ago, I responded to a girlfriend’s question of how does she look with the answer ‘fine’. I thought ‘fine’ was a positive adjective. “You look fiiiiiiiiine.”  But apparently it was not taken that way.  To her. ‘fine’ fell somewhere between ‘barely acceptable’ and ‘you look like utter crap’, which was far from my intended response. My average mentality did not prevent that faux pas, but allowed me to learn not to ever say that anymore. Then again, I would have never told her she looked ‘average’ so I can understand why the word might not look like the most positive description of my brain’s power ranking.

In this case, to me, ‘average’ implies half the folks walking the planet are smarter than me but also infers I can look down upon and taunt the dimness of the other half. Nanny nanny boo boo. The middle is not a bad place to be. The Nobel committee is not banging on my door like Publisher’s Clearing House with a box of confetti and an oversized check but I’m also not competing against Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith, Oliver St. John-Mollusc and Nigel Incubator-Jones for the Twit Of The Year award.  If you couple my ‘average’ intellect with a healthy dose of common sense, street smarts and somewhat accurately functioning DNA, I seem to have a lot on the ball. Thank you Mom and Dad.

I will admit there have been times I’ve felt smugly superior and super smart, but like the appropriately named Fleet enema, those moments are fleeting and pass through me quickly.  After creatively solving some major problem or deciphering a difficult dilemma, I tend to mentally strut around like an overly stereotypical 1970s cop show pimp feeling proud of my abilities and acumen. Unfortunately, it’s usually only seconds later when I stumble, and something inevitably knocks me off my semi-high hobby horse putting me back in my average place.

Just last Friday afternoon I felt great about myself before I left for a four-day extended weekend. I had been all cocky at work as I impossibly multi-tasked through my entire to-do list like an ambidextrous octopus. All vacation I was full of myself till the plane ride home when it hit me, I had completely forgotten the two simplest tasks that will have now undoubtedly blown up into some significant Wednesday morning headaches.

This is a somewhat twisted repeated theme in my life. Whenever I feel comfortable and contented with an achievement or have finally worked myself into a place or position I am proud of, it all seems to crash around me like a Dan’s Universe Jenga puzzle that I carefully removed all the right pieces but still somehow gets knocked down. Or maybe it’s just a trait of the astoundingly average to focus on the dramatic crash instead of all the successful moves that it took to get there.

On more than one occasion I have interviewed my way into a dandy job. I invested the time and effort to advance myself into the perfect position. Then just when I hit a comfortable successful plateau where I could sit back and say ‘I made it’, the entire company collapsed due to external forces outside of my control, leaving me to start over again. Maybe an above-averager would have seen it coming but a sub-averager might not have the ability to get there in the first place.

I think being average is something to celebrate. It’s the perfect spot. The pressures of being mega-smart would eat me up and burn me out. I’d feel like I was wasting my time if my superior brain were not constantly engaged in solving the world’s woes. If I were on the other end of the spectrum, I would be forever frustrated with my dullard discourse and shoddy skills. Instead I am hanging with Goldilocks right in the middle of that bell curve on the comfy ‘just right’ sofa. Just smart enough to know who I am, what I want and how to get there.