2025 Wrap-Up: Looking Back, Looking Forward

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I’m closing out 2025 with a review of the most popular articles I’ve posted on this blog since its inception in January 2017. With All Due Respect has a limited audience of just over one hundred followers, composed chiefly of friends, former colleagues, and a few strangers who have found me through internet searches. It’s intriguing what people find interesting. 

LOOKING BACK …

…at my stats over the last nine years, the most popular post, the one with over 1.5K hits, surprisingly is Nursing Homes: Clothing and Incontinence. It has topped the list of most-read annually for the life of the blog, including in 2025. Indeed, five of the top fifteen articles are related to aging, senior health care, and nursing homes. Is this surprising? Is aging of concern just for my peers, or more generally these days?

This article on incontinence and the treatment of patient clothing in nursing facilities gets at the very heart of human dignity and the respect or lack thereof that we demonstrate toward one another. Incontinence is often viewed by those who are gradually losing control over their lives and their bodies as the last frontier, the most humiliating, debasing loss. I’m not surprised that search engines have brought readers to my humble blog post.

I imagine a reader, perhaps a daughter, exhausted by months or years of care for her elderly parents, seeking advice on what to expect if she gives in and places one or both in a nursing facility.  What would upset Mom most, she wonders. What would Dad hate the most about it? Sitting in a urine puddle in a bed or wheelchair, she suspects. So, she searches the internet to find out how nursing homes manage incontinent patients.  Up pops my post, and she is mesmerized and appalled.

Little has changed in nursing facilities in the nine years since I wrote that article. The better-funded and staffed ones do a more acceptable job of managing incontinence and clothing care. However, the direction of senior health care funding in this country does not bode well for the future of even these places. The general societal attitude toward the elderly has not improved appreciably, though end-of-life care through hospice and Death with Dignity legislation have advanced the quality of life approaching death for many.

Curiously, my second-most popular blog post is The Waterwheel, with 803 hits.  It quotes well-known and beloved poet Rumi’s wisdom and was written just a few days after the start of the COVID pandemic. Its message of taking up and letting go, embracing and relinquishing, is just as personally, socially, and politically relevant now as it was in March 2020. I suspect most readers find it by googling “Rumi” or, perhaps, “letting go,” a frequent theme in my writing.

The Anatomy of Respect, with 617 hits, comes in third. It goes to the heart and root of this blog over the last nine years by emphasizing the role of listening deeply to understand and develop respect.  I have tried to link each essay, poem, and story in the blog to the theme of respect and have encouraged my readers to share their experiences and reflections in response.  Truthfully, only a few readers have done so.

The most extensive dialogue with a reader occurred when a self-described, deeply conservative Republican, then Trump supporter, businessman, and father, Ryan, challenged me to engage in conversation about our differences after I posted the next-most-popular article (with 323 hits), Deep Listening, in December 2020. Our exchange of philosophical, political, and religious ideas, recorded in the comments following the Deep Listening article, began in February 2021. It ended in July 2022 when his family and business life became too busy and complicated for him to continue writing. It was fascinating and encouraging to see how much we had in common. Also, it was extremely challenging to be open-minded and respectful when we differed.

Often, at the beginning of a new year, I launch a new theme with the intention of focusing my writing on a particular aspect of respect throughout the year. It’s not always apparent how the theme relates to my overall subject. For instance, Practicing for the Big Let Go, begun in January 2024, initiated my reflections on letting go in everyday situations as a way of preparing for our final surrender at the time of death. What does this have to do with respect? Letting go involves engaging with the fundamental truth of impermanence—constant change. It requires respect for oneself, others, the flow of events, and our nature as human beings.

LOOKING FORWARD

As 2026 looms on the horizon, and I take stock of the world around me, close to home and farther away, I find it disingenuous to wish an uncomplicated and joyful “Happy New Year” to my friends. I wonder which aspect of respect we will encounter, reflect on, and perhaps write about in the coming year.  As I grow older, my journey toward self-awareness takes me into more vulnerable, authentic, and intuitive territory. As I approach the culmination of life, I’m confronted by my affinity, even my oneness, with those whose ideas and actions I find disturbing or even abhorrent. Painful as it sometimes is, I sense my kinship and interdependence with everyone and everything. Thich Nhat Hanh called this “interbeing.” Acknowledging our interbeing, my three-fold aim to do no harm, help everyone, and embrace life just as it is, is a perennial and unrelenting challenge.

So, instead of “Happy New Year,” here’s my wish for us all. May we seek to respect one another, and may we meet next year’s opportunities to do so with courage, accept their invitation with curiosity, and respond with compassion.

Just Like Me – Respecting Difficult People

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In their 2018 book Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush introduce a practice geared to generate understanding, respect, and compassion for others. It’s called Just Like Me. While it can be used with friends, acquaintances, or neutral persons, I believe it is particularly beneficial for identifying with those we think are radically different from us and for whom we find it difficult to feel sympathy.

Calling to mind a person we dislike, disagree with, hate, or hold in contempt, we are encouraged to repeat the following phrases: This person

… has a body and a mind, just like me.

… has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.

… has experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.

… has at some time been sad, disappointed, angry, or hurt, just like me.

… has felt unworthy or inadequate, just like me.

… worries and is frightened sometimes, just like me.

… will die, just like me.

… has longed for friendship, just like me.

… is learning about life, just like me.

… wants to be caring and kind to others, just like me.

… wants to be content with what life has given them, just like me.

… wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.

… wishes to be safe and healthy, just like me.

… wishes to be happy, just like me.

… wishes to be loved, just like me.

I first encountered this practice on a retreat during 2020. I cannot now recall whether the retreat came before or shortly after the US Presidential election, but when the facilitator asked us to call to mind a difficult person, Donald Trump popped into my head immediately. Donald Trump is nothing like me; I protested internally! I quickly searched for another, less challenging person, but I could not quickly come up with anyone. So, I closed my eyes, called up a mental image of President Trump, and began repeating the phrases silently after the facilitator. I encourage you to go back and read them now with Trump or any challenging person in mind.

I was astounded by how many times I could say with sincerity that Mr. Trump was “just like me!”  I must admit I had some difficulty with “has felt unworthy or inadequate,” “has longed for friendship,” “is learning about life,” “wants to be caring and kind to others,” and “wants to be content with what life has given them.” However, I could embrace enough statements for the exercise to reveal our likeness and soften my heart slightly. Perhaps removing the word “just” would make the practice even more palatable.

Next comes the even more challenging pursuit of wishing the difficult person well, using phrases including:

I wish this person to be free from pain and suffering.

I wish this person to be peaceful and happy.

I wish this person to be loved because this person is a fellow human being, just like me.

The point is to consider respecting the other, not for what they have said or done, but because I acknowledge their humanness—their actions and words may have arisen from very human desires, fears, suffering, and losses, as do mine. In this practice, respect does not equate with approval, praise, agreement, or even tolerance but, instead, involves understanding and empathy. Therefore, treating the difficult person with respect may entail giving them the benefit of the doubt and offering compassion rather than mockery, rebuke, denunciation, or bitter criticism.

“And what would such respect look like concerning Mr. Trump?” I ask myself. Perhaps it would involve refraining from posting unflattering pictures of him on Facebook or liking jokes at his expense on social media. Maybe it would rule out repeating plausible but unsubstantiated stories about his actions or words or stoking fires of anger and hatred against him. Such restraint would mean forgoing delicious opportunities for cleverness and self-righteousness. 

On the positive side, it means offering genuine good wishes for healing, clarity, and humility, hoping that his heart will open with understanding and compassion, just as I hope that mine will open. I am convinced that sending positive energy in his direction cannot do the slightest harm.

Does all of this sound pollyannaish? Then take Trump out of the equation and substitute your problematic next-door neighbor, the family member who disrupts every holiday gathering, the boss who criticizes everything you do, or the friend who breaks your confidence. Even the dog who won’t stop barking! How can a dog be just like me? Think danger, fear, boredom, confusion, pain, past trauma, and family heritage.

Religious and secular platitudes about this “just like me” concept include The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Buddhist idea of interbeing and interdependence (no left, no right, no up, no down, no you, no me) also captures the notion. The once-popular song Walk A Mile In My Shoes suggests how we gain respect for those we find difficult or different. (I’d encourage you to listen to this cool old music video.)

The bottom line—to respect those who do not seem to deserve our respect, we must see what we have in common with them. Yes, we are different, but what essential qualities unite us? And how can we act respectfully while disagreeing, resisting, and taking a stand against our opponents?

Repeating Myself

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Sometimes I wonder if the Source, or whatever name you use (the energy of life, God, the I AM, the unmanifested one, the universal consciousness, Mother Earth) has created the Coronavirus to give us human beings the opportunity to recognize our interconnectedness and interdependence.  Or our “interbeing,” as the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, would say.

If you follow the emergence, re-emergence, first, second and third waves of COVID-19 around the world, you will notice that as soon as we humans begin to let down our guard, we experience another outbreak. When we put individual desires and wills ahead of the common good, we start down the path of another “surge.”

The refusal to wear a mask because it is “my right” to choose whether or not I do, puts those around you in danger.  The need to “open up” as fast as possible for the sake of the economy (this all-important economy in which the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer) precipitates another surge in COVID cases.  The refusal to be vaccinated sets us all back on the road to “herd immunity.”  The current competition for vaccines worldwide and the disparities in vaccination rates in rich and developing countries flies in the face of the truth that none of us will be safe until all of us are safe—from anything.

The Coronavirus goes on, mutating, developing new strains, dodging, and eluding all our attempts to beat it back. Should we ultimately succeed in defeating COVID, when will the next pandemic strike? What will the subsequent super infectious disease be? And the next?

Could the lesson we are avoiding be—everything is entirely dependent and interdependent? Huge disparities in health, wealth, and resources only create instability that ultimately undermines everyone’s safety, security, well-being, and perhaps even our continued existence.

(See also: I Dream a World, COVID Sacrifice, Cleansing or Transforming?)