One can view members of a family, a student class, a hospital unit, a
hospital staff, several related hospital staffs, health services
organizations within a geographic area, a profession, a town to a world
or universe as community. Man's mind, my mind, determines where I
superimpose the limits or lift the limits or relate components. In _The
Republic_ Plato depicted a community as a macrocosm.[1] Its nature was
conditioned by the kinds of men, the microcosms, that composed it. The
macrocosm was a reflection of its microcosms.
So each human person, each nurse, as a microcosm, could make a
difference. Reflecting on the lived worlds of nurses, their communities,
if we use Plato's philosophical analogy of macrocosm-microcosm, despite
the varieties of situation, we can make meaningful a basic concept of
community. Such a concept utilized by a nurse to view her particular
ongoing changing world can help her to understand more realistically,
survive within, and strugglingly participate as a quality force.
To be a quality force within community a nurse must open her being to
the endless innovative possibilities and unattempted choices available
to her. {38} The ability to thus open one's self requires our exposing
our biases, the shades through which we regard the world, to the
sunlight. In nursing our shades often are closed categories, labels,
diagnoses, trite superficial hackneyed expressions learned by us, taught
to us as fact, taken in unexamined, and left unreexamined despite other
changes in ourselves and our situations. Socrates said, and it still
holds, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Our shades can be
cherished concepts, beliefs that guide us automatically rather than
thoughtfully. Whether they are entirely myth or partial truths, they can
cause us agonizing dilemma because they obscure the obviously relevant
and the possibilities beyond. A concept of community, if grasped and if
a nurse is truly consciously aware, can help her to understand how her
nursing world has evolved, is presently, and how she can be, to shape
its future in accordance with her values.
As nurses one of our shades is often the confining labels we give to
ourselves as doers in service giving profession. I would like to go on
record as most respectful of this aspect of my world. I regret,
nonetheless, that we have not always similarly crystallized and
floodlighted the discovery and creative possibilities in our
communities. In our very personal, intimate, involved professional
nursing relations with other man we are privileged to be included in
human happenings open to no other group. As nurses, we have had and are
having emphasized to us the importance of facts handed to us. Can we
actuate the importance of the knowledge of man that becomes part of us
through our nursing worlds? It is hard to honor the significance of the
everyday, the commonplace, the intimately known? It has been said that
one could know of the whole universe if one could make every possible
relationship starting from a piece of bread. Think of a "simple" or
"routine" nursing situation. Think of its true complexity and how it can
trigger puzzlement, wonderment, and thinking. As learning situations,
nurses' situations are existentially priceless. Returning now to Plato's
conception of community understood through the terms macrocosm and
microcosm, what can the nursing world situation reveal to us of
community? What are the qualities of the participants, the microcosms,
and how are these qualities reflected in our nursing communities?