Looking back, and then ahead again

The New Year shines a light on the importance of values, experiences, and time

Jan 10, 2025

Before we get into the main event - which I hope you’ll take the time to really read - I have a couple of announcements.

First, I’m hosting a low-key New Year - Thank You - Birthday party from 5-8 p.m. on Jan. 11 at Sandhills Brewing. The new space there is up and running and it’s gorgeous. One of the things I’ll bring is my “Live Your Values” cards - which you will read about shortly. I’d love if you’d come enjoy the evening with us. Here’s the event link

Secondly, we published an episode of That Podcast in Hutch this week. For this episode we brought in my friend Jackson Swearer to interview me. He asked me to reflect on my years of service in the Kansas Legislature and the most recent election. It’s not often I’m on the other side of the microphone, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this one. Find That Podcast in Hutch on your favorite streaming service. Or go here.

Now let’s get to the main course…

A lot sure can change in a year.

This time last year, I was preparing to head off to the Kansas Legislature for what I couldn’t have known then would be my last term.

It’s an interesting thing about life - you never know when you might be doing something for the last time. And then, when you do realize it was the last time, a mind can wonder whether it might have been managed differently had you known then that this one moment, would be the last of it’s kind.

I think of this now, considering the news of wildfires in California, and with snow-related traffic accidents in Kansas.

We live this life sometimes with all this busyness, always planning and striving for some far off date, some future goal, some distant horizon. All the while we might not know that in any moment, we might hug or kiss our loved ones for the last time. We might have unknowingly shared a last meal with a friend. We might leave our house whole and never enter it again.

As I moved through the new year and the new session in 2024, I asked my friends to play a sort of game with me - a game called “Live Your Values.”

The aim of the game is simple - go through the 78-card deck and evaluate the personal values listed on each card, sort those values by level of importance, and eventually end up with the top 10-values that guide your life.

At the start of last year, I took this deck with me almost everywhere. And I recruited a number of people to join in the experiment - partly because I had a couple of theories and wanted to see if they would hold true.

Theory No. 1 was that for the vast majority of people, their top personal values would not be what are culturally held up as top values. I don’t think anyone chose wealth or power. A few people chose success and stability, but the money-worship values that seems to pollute our modern culture weren’t widely present when people are asked to look into their hearts and name the values that matter most.

Theory No. 2 was that there would be at least a handful of shared values across a wide variety of people. This also largely held true. Most people held family, integrity, love, compassion, wisdom, thoughtfulness, purpose, or some other related value in their list of top 10. Notably absent were the sort of values that get elevated on social media or in our popular entertainment media.

I decided to take the deck with me to Topeka to carry out this exercise with a variety of legislators. I’d bring it with me to some of the after-hours evening events and work to convince wary lawmakers that there would be no harm in examining their values. (I also took the deck with me on Biking Across Kansas and had my friends there do it as well).

In exchange for their willingness to play along (which included taking a photo of their final values) I agreed that I would never reveal the names behind the values. And while in the wake of an election where big money paid to spread lies about me, it’s tempting to highlight how some people didn’t hold closely to their values at all, I value keeping my word - so I’ll share the photos, but not the names, as I promised.

One person did agree to let me use his photograph, Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins. I was happy that he agreed to my experiment. A number of people from the “other side of the aisle” indulged my experiment - including a good number of people in leadership. I am grateful for their willingness to participate, and to be open and authentic.

I believed such an experiment could be fun, while also building a sense of connection and deeper understanding of one another. I thought it might be a way to make a place like the Kansas Legislature a bit more in touch with of our shared humanity. Maybe it did. I’d like to think so. It’s depressing to think the concepts of values and virtues can so easily be replaced by the ambitions of power and the urge to win at all costs.

Everything can be stripped away from us. Even the strongest man grows weak in time. Even the wealthiest man dies. Our lives are fragile, no matter how much we’d like to imagine they are not, and our ambitions mean little to the forces of Nature and God.

What persists over time is our values, how we live them in our lives, and how we employ them in our families, our communities, and our world. The choices we make, the policies we promote, are living extensions of our truest values.

On Saturday, at Sandhills, I’m going to bring my deck of cards and I hope you’ll sit down with me to examine and record your values. It is really a fun thing to do - with the added feature of being very useful throughout the year.

This will be my third year in a row doing this. I find that there are some core values that never change, but some values change in importance or shift as my thinking and ideas move in time.

For the past two years, I’ve tried to consider my top values when making decisions in my life. I will try to pause long enough to ask if what I’m doing is aligned with my stated values. Sadly, I don’t always live my values. Or I don’t live them as well as I’d like. It can be a challenge to stay on course all of the time. But naming those values, examining them, and having a concrete way to recall them, helps build the path that allows me to move back to what I’ve identified as the core values in my life.

In 2024, my values were in order: Love, Genuineness, Responsibility, Gratitude, Self-Awareness, Passion, Growth, Health, Openness, Purpose.