Opinion : The Smart Alek’s Somewhat Serious Guide to Graduation Clichés

Life does not consist of the number of breaths we take, but of the number of moments that take our breath away.

Like when the water in the shower suddenly turns ice cold.

Throughout the next few weeks, high school (and college) seniors – witnessed by millions of their friends and family members -- will sit in hard chairs and stuffy robes in hot gymnasiums, listening to graduation speeches. Most of them, based on my experience, will be boring and stuffed full of clichés. (The speeches, not the graduates.)   

Some of those speeches may even sound a bit like this:

    My Fellow Graduates:

    This is our time. Everyone knows that our school rocks (pause for applause).  But now, as we look back, it's time to step forward into the future.

     This is a watershed moment; it's time for us to be the change we want to see in the world. We need to rise to the occasion, take the bull by the horns and have a glass half-full approach to life. It's not rocket science to know we gotta keep on believin! Let's Roll!

Not every speech will be that mindlessly muttered, of course. Almost every speech, however, is guaranteed to have some kind of mostly-meaningless motivational statement that appears countless times in graduation ceremonies.

While many of those phrases contain good advice, most of them also are conditional statements – statements that are true at times, and not-so-worth-following at other times.

“Never give up.”

That inspirational phrase – attributed not-quite-accurately to Britain’s famous World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchhill – does contain words worth hearing.

However: Giving up is sometimes the best option.

If, for example, you are the Emperor Hirohito of Japan and the President of the U.S. says, “Give up,” you should.

But Hirohito did not give up.

Now, 70-some years later, the U.S. President is visiting the first city to show the world the dreadful power of nuclear weapons. One man’s failure to give up caused an entire world decades of nuclear worries, and led to an arms race that taught us about a defense strategy called “MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction” – and countless lame, unoriginal action movies about saving the U.S. from nuclear holocaust.

On the other hand, General Robert E. Lee did give up, realizing with his wisdom and military experience that his outnumbered, starving Confederate soldiers had no chance of victory. America, a century and a half later, is still the United States.

There are times when giving up was, for me, the smartest move. You are reading this column now because in 2008, I gave up on the old-fashioned newspaper business, realizing that for me, it’s a dead end. I gave up and started the journey that led to Vinton Today.

There are other graduation quotes that make smart aleks like me think of some other meaning than the one the speaker probably had in mind.

For example:

Live each day like it's your last  -- run up lots of bills because you won't be around to pay them.

Two roads diverged in a wood– and I realized that someone had done a very, very bad job of civil engineering.

Push the envelope-- but make sure there are no cameras in the room when you pass the money to the politician.

By the way, Graduation Speech Writer, never – and this is one of many exceptions to the “Never say never” cliché – never use a cliché without knowing exactly what it means.

No, I don’t mean “Know what you think it means.”

I mean: Know where the phrase came from, and how it applies to the rest of the world.

“Push the envelope” is a very powerful phrase, when speakers use it properly. “Envelope,” in this case, of course, does not mean “a paper container for money with which to bribe politicians.”

No.

In this phrase, “envelope” refers to the outer skin of an airplane. “Pushing the envelope” meant the efforts of pilots who were testing planes to push the boundaries of flight so they could find out just how fast and how high a plane could go, and how quickly it could dive, turn or otherwise change direction, without plummeting out of control and causing the kind of moment that would take the pilot’s breath away forever.

“Give 110 percent.” (I didn't do so well in math, either.) Applied with its intellectual honestly, this means that you give all you have, plus something you stole from someone else. While I suppose that in some cases it’s possible to give more than 100 percent, it’s generally not practical – or legal.

“Wherever you are, be all there.”

This is one of my favorite quotes to hate. The main message is good – “If you do something, do it with all your might,” as the Bible says.

But on the other hand, if you stuck in a very long, very boring meeting with the clueless person in charge mindlessly mumbling as though they were giving a graduation speech, you will be much, much happier if you are not “all there.”

Even if your body is stuck in a terribly dull meeting and an even more terribly uncomfortable chair, give your mind the freedom to get up and leave the room. Set it free for planning ahead, thinking about something else you need to do, or simply daydreaming. You will learn very early in your post-high school life that there are lots of places (and people) who deserve much, much less than your full attention. So give them what they deserve.

"No man is an island."

That's not true. I looked it up. Noman is NOT an island. It's a street in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. Karachi is a port city that comes to a point at the water's edge, near where the Gulf of Oman meets the Persian Gulf, and it is in a corner of Pakistan that is surrounded on three sides by water. So you would be accurate in saying that Noman is a path to a peninsula. But Noman is not an island.

I could go on and on ad infinitum. But you get my point.

So the next time someone asks you to give a graduation speech, remember the instructions you received in your high school writing class: “Put it in your own words.”

And if you do it well enough, people will start quoting you until your words become immortalized in the Book of Overused Graduation Clichés.