As 2025 comes to a close and we look to brighter days ahead, I find myself thinking about wishes. Not the grand kind you’d buy if you had billions of dollars — the quiet type that grows in the chest, that takes the shape of a friendly face or a neighbor’s help that arrives at the exact moment you need it.
My wish for 2026 is simple enough to say, but stubborn, like all good hopes: That we keep choosing each other.
What I see in our community is not people waiting to be rescued. It’s working folks carrying one another through storms that never really made the headlines. The teacher who keeps granola bars in her desk because she knows who will come to school hungry. The retired electrician who snow-blows half the block without being asked. The parent juggling two jobs and still somehow managing to coach their child’s sport. The cashier who remembers your mom’s name.
None of them have billions of dollars. Most don’t even have the cushion they deserve. But they know a secret the rich keep trying to spend their way around: Joy isn’t a luxury good. It’s a practice. A stubborn, daily rebellion against despair. And it thrives best in community.
May we keep insisting on the good life, not the glossy version on a billboard, but the real one.
And I’ll tell you how I talk about this with our kids. When we talk about wealth, I don’t reach for numbers; I reach for the good stuff. Some days, we are rich in beaded bracelets. Other days, we are rich in pick-up hugs. Many days, we are rich in dad jokes, which makes us equally wealthy in eye rolls. This, I tell them, is real wealth: the kind you can’t deposit, can’t hoard, and can’t lose to the stock market. The kind that grows only when shared. And the sort of stuff that keeps us motivated when it is time to roll up our sleeves and get back into the fight for everyone’s opportunity to earn and thrive.
So my wish for 2026 is that we square up to that truth with both feet. That we stop pretending any of us has to deny someone else’s humanity to survive. We don’t. We never did. The lie that we must fight over scraps while a handful hoards the rest is wearing thin and people are beginning to see the threads now.
And yes, I also carry a quieter, harder wish. That the people who harm this community through peddling this false narrative, who wield their unprocessed wounds like weapons, find the healing they so desperately need. May they learn to sit with themselves instead of taking their unmet needs out on the public. May they rediscover the center they lost somewhere along the way, the reason they once felt called to public service. Before power became something to hoard, before they forgot that leadership was supposed to be a lantern, not a bludgeon.
Healing doesn’t excuse harm. And none of us is immune to committing it. But without healing, the harm just keeps circling. And we are long past the time for the cycle to break.
My hope, audacious as it sounds, is that class solidarity becomes our neighborhood reflex. That we talk plainly about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and how we reclaim what was always meant to be shared. That taking care of one another stops being framed as idealistic and starts being understood as the oldest survival strategy in the human story.
May we keep insisting on the good life, not the glossy version on a billboard, but the real one:
A life where families have time instead of fear.
Where workers have dignity instead of exhaustion.
Where leaders earn trust instead of demanding loyalty.
Where we measure wealth in safety, in rest, in laughter, in the knowledge that someone down the street would show up for you and you’d show up for them.
This season, I’m holding tight to the belief that we can build that future — not through miracles, but through the small, unglamorous, everyday work of being decent to each other.
We do what we can, where we can, with what we have. And somehow, astonishingly, it adds up.
Here’s to a year of choosing each other. Here’s to a community that remembers its own power. Here’s to the quiet, ordinary wish that might just change everything.
Elise Shrock is a communications professional and policy advocate whose work intersects in the areas of spirituality, women’s empowerment and Hispanic affairs. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
