There were many years in my life when I spent weeks preparing intricate New Year’s resolutions. I found the practice invigorating. To take time to think about what I wanted most in my life, and to orient myself toward that, was to turn off life’s cruise control and work the pedals to my best advantage.

At least, that’s what it was supposed to be. My grand plans inevitably involved getting up early, working out, writing every day, eating only nutrient dense foods, only scrolling on my phone within a specified time, going to bed early, etc. My resolutions were always extreme, and they always sounded really good at the time.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that in spite of my enthusiasm for resolving to live my life a certain way, those resolutions didn’t ever hold for more than a few months, at best. I kept at my annual resolving for a long time, still enjoying the process but increasingly aware that it didn’t have the effectiveness I wished for, no matter what I did to plan my way through the various failure points I identified. Always other things got in the way. Births, deaths, changing homes, health issues, changing jobs, stressors from so many sources, along with the endless drumbeat of work and the needs of loved ones.

So I find myself wondering: What does it really mean to make a resolution? How can anyone resolve to live their absolute best when this is not a world of absolutes, but of gradation? How can anyone stand so firmly in their resolve when we are all standing here, together? I can only ride my accelerator for so long before I encounter other cars on the road. Sometimes, even in Wichita, there’s a lot of traffic.

The tendency to believe in the rugged individualist is deeply ingrained in so many of us. To hold that figure as the ideal is such a habit that it feels like a core value. We often think of ourselves as highly independent. But we do not exist in a vacuum. We exist in a community. And maybe making resolutions in a vacuum is as silly as imagining that you can get from Rock Road to Maize Road without braking. Sure, your car is capable of making that trip faster. But it won’t – it never will – because we’re all here together.

Maybe when it comes to making resolutions, we’ve been doing it wrong because we’ve been resolving solo. Imagine, instead, if we shared a vision for where we wanted to go. Maybe I don’t need to force myself to get up early if I was up late talking with a friend who needed me. Is it really so important that I eschew social media when a local organization that needs a boost could benefit from my “likes?” Maybe getting across town as fast as physically possible doesn’t seem so important when we know where the other cars are heading too, and why.

At the end of the day, we all want something different. And there isn’t an easy way to reconcile my wants with your wants with the community’s larger needs. But there are some things we know about what makes life good and what makes the years that go by worth living. There is data that can help us orient as a whole. What it takes to live a good life isn’t rocket science, but it is complex. America’s Health Rankings, for example, have identified a series of measures of health, and we know where we stand as a state. So, what if we as a state, made a communal resolution? What if we in our own communities had shared resolve for 2025? What might that look like?

A shift in perspective is the first step toward trying such an experiment. Rather than chiding myself for no longer getting up at the crack of dawn by the time March rolls around, what if I moved through each day with my community in mind? If we are social animals, then improving the health of our communities will inevitably mean better health for us as individuals. And after goodness knows how many years of resolutions that didn’t stick, it might just be worth trying. So how about it? Let’s plan some resolutions together and see what happens.

Happy new year…