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.

What Now? Reprise

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It’s been over a month since I posted here and over two since I wrote the first “What Now?” article. Honestly, I don’t know what to think or say about anything these days. I’m tongue-tied. That’s as it should be, counsels the Tao te Ching: “Those who know, don’t talk. Those who talk, don’t know.”

Each morning, sometimes before and sometimes just after my meditation time, I read Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, Letters from an American. I choose to follow her rather than some other news commentator because I like her framing of current events in the context of history, and she’s a Mainer from near my home. Her newsletter and listening to the occasional few minutes of NPR while driving are my meager attempts at awareness of significant events in our country and the world. Like many of my friends, I feel a responsibility to be aware but cannot cope with more intense and in-depth exposure to the news. It is too depressing, frightening, and immobilizing.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve identified and clung to specific anchors that steady me in times of turmoil like this one—help me rise and fall with the tides but keep me from drifting in rough currents. Some anchors are rituals or repetitive practices that calm and focus me. Some are objects or words that inspire or guide me. I’m always looking for symbols that help me make meaning and keep me steady. 

A few weekends ago, I visited Blue Cliff, a Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery in upstate New York. The monks and nuns who live there practice the Thich Nhat Hanh Buddhist tradition. That weekend, they were celebrating the third anniversary of his death, or “continuation” as they call it. Besides a few American Buddhists from Maine, Vermont, and elsewhere, dozens of Vietnamese Americans from the New York-New Jersey area came to meditate, chant, hear Buddhist teachings, and eat delicious Vietnamese food. I was fascinated by the rituals and chanting, curious about the customs, and delighted by the food. It wasn’t the sort of silent, secluded retreat I typically seek or enjoy, but it had a simplicity, pageantry, and wisdom that moved me deeply.

One of the most potent takeaway images from the weekend was this wooden calligraphy panel that focused the eyes immediately upon entering their exquisitely designed meditation hall.

I was awestruck the moment I saw it—so profoundly true and precisely the message I needed to receive, an anchor I could cling to. This Is It. This moment, this place, this situation, this country, this world—this is all there is. So, stop wishing for this to end, for something else to come, to be somewhere else, to be rescued from this current calamity. This is it—the only thing you have to work with, the only reality, your only opportunity. So, embrace it, celebrate it even. Open your eyes, ears, and heart, let the right action arise within you and proceed from you, and let go of the burden of the outcome. This is it. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing other.

For an hour on Sunday afternoon, their gift shop was open for guests to browse and shop. I went looking for a token of the message I had received and found this simple postcard in Thich Nhat Hanh’s calligraphy. I purchased it and brought it home to place in the window opposite my meditation seat so, as candles flicker beneath it and the sun rises behind it each morning, I can look at it and beyond it to what is outside my window.  

This Is It—the only time and place I have. I am surrounded by the only people I can respect and love. This is the only moment when I can recognize beauty, speak the truth, be kind, and do justice.