Why Clichés are Clichés

I recently gave a toast in a backyard filled with black-and-gold balloons, oversized letters that spelled PROM, as well as 30 high school students and thier parents.

I took it upon myself to do what every person making this type of speech does: I told them to keep being themselves and follow their hearts, cliché words of encouragement that held a truth but will remain meaningless until they are challenged.

Those of us parents who felt the meaning in the “cliché” of self-love and worthiness that afternoon before we loaded our young adult children onto the bus for a night of dinner and dancing are the ones who have felt the challenge of holding on to the foundation of self-love and worthiness we built through our adolescent years that we were determind to use to make the world a bit better than the one our parents left us.

The emotion we felt when we watched them walk into the belly of the bus and out of sight was not because we didn’t think they were ready; it was knowing that society would distract them from the foundation they had built. It was knowing that society would value them only for what it could see, not for what existed deep in their hearts.  It was knowing that they themselves might lose sight of what they love about themselves and the value they bring to the world that we, as parents, worked so hard to protect over the past 18 years. 

There is a reason clichés become clichés: we say them in the hope that whoever they are directed to can bypass the challenge they will have to endure to find the meaning, even though we know that is impossible.

So we let our kids board the bus to thier next stop with the hope that they take with them the courage we had to let them become who they are and fight for what they believe, because the world might not know it now, but it will need what lives deep inside this generation to make it better, thier personal purpose.