THE AVERAGE PERSON

I came across an article the other day about the average American.

Apparently, the average person eats 17 teaspoons of sugar a day, carries over $100,000 in debt, walks fewer than 4,000 steps, gets less than ten minutes of silence each day, and will spend the equivalent of twenty years watching television or scrolling a phone.

Twenty years.

Somewhere, someone binge-watched an entire decade.

I wish I could tell you I read that list and thought, Well… glad that’s not me.

Unfortunately…

I checked off at least four of those boxes.

Maybe five.

Depends on how honest we’re being.

That’s what bothered me.

Not the statistics.

The word.

Average.

It sounds so harmless.

Comforting, even.

If enough of us are doing it, it must be okay.

But maybe average isn’t a description.

Maybe it’s a warning.

Then something happened last night.

Around 10:00, Abbey wandered out into the backyard and just… stood there looking at the moon.

No phone.

No music.

No distractions.

Just a little girl asking big questions.

“Why does it look so close tonight?”

“Do people on the other side of the world see the same moon?”

“Does God ever get tired of looking at it?”

I answered every question.

Well… I think I did.

At least somewhat accurately.

And somewhere between her questions and the silence that followed, I realized something.

The moon hadn’t become more beautiful.

I’d simply become available enough to notice it.

Maybe that’s what we’ve been missing.

Not another productivity hack.

Not another app.

Not another way to become more efficient.

Just more moments like that.

Because I have a feeling the richest people aren’t the ones who accumulate the most.

They’re the ones who notice the most.

Maybe that’s the kind of above average worth chasing.

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