Should we let cliches about gratitude influence our joy?

 

It is okay to feel let down when we hear cliches about improving our lives. The message, however, should be one that we ponder. Cliches about being grateful, for instance, are ones that we readily recognize to be cliches worthy of reflection. Now, as a writing instructor of almost fifteen years, I can admit that I don't like it when my writers use a lot of cliches. It's not an efficient prose style, I like to tell them. I also like to inform my writers that cliches in and of themselves are just fine. It's stopping with the cliche that's the problem. One should always look at a cliche as an opportunity to explain it. Then, that cliche has power. One should always be prepared to follow and explain a cliche. In that sense, every cliche on writes is an opportunity to further develop the paragraph, paper, or post. 

This post is about being grateful. Yes, that old cliche. But I'm not stopping with that cliche. I'm following an explaining it. It is a point of development for this blog. Every post, in a sense, is an example of what being grateful means. 

DO NOT STOP WITH THE CLICHE: We should not live in a culture where we stop with that cliche. We must live it. We must find new ways to restore its meaning in our lives. Being grateful has so many layers. It also has some adjacent cliches, such as "Be thankful for what you have" and "Don't be jealous." I don't want to stop with the cliche, and I hope you won't either. 

A cliche is also an invitation for someone to reflect more deeply on their own thinking. It is a call to question. It is a call to go deeper on something that has value in a person's life. In that sense, this blog serves as a call to everyone to reflect more deeply on what it means to be grateful. Does it mean hugging your loved one a few seconds longer than usual? Does it mean offering a compliment to oneself? Does it mean cultivating a mindset where our prayers are not please, but thanks? I think there's so much value in thinking through the cliche of being grateful. And I hope this post serves to motivate you to question cliches in your life. Don't ignore them. Question them. Learn from them. If the cliche is a positive expression that we should all look at, then we owe it to ourselves to use and follow more positive cliches in our lives. 

It's understandable that people may roll their eyes when they hear "Be grateful." A point of this post is to inform people that it's still okay to roll one's eyes when they hear or read a cliche. But question. Question whether or not that cliche has value. If it's overused expression, it might be overused for a reason. That is certainly the case with life advice such as "Be thankful." We all have things in our lives we can be thankful. The foremost example is health. We cannot do anything without our health. If have the ability to get up in the morning and tackle our days, we have something to be thankful for. If we have someone we can hug, we have something to be thankful for.