Nursing experience taught me that each man, each family, each community
was at once alike and different. Hesse, an existential novelist, in
_Steppenwolf_, {40} describes each man who has become in family and
community as like an onion with hundreds of integuments or a texture
with many threads.[4] Then man's differences would be in the quality of
his integuments and their development or in his threads in their
preponderance. Contemplating the struggles in community regarding mutual
understanding, I expanded Hesse's conception of man and found my vision
of community to be a salad tossing or a patchwork quilt tumble drying.
Valuing the complexity of this conception of man and therefore of
community I find myself smiling at the naivety of the earlier more
static frames of order I superimposed on these phenomena. These
oversimplifications maintained the shade through which I viewed my
world. The shade was: others are knowing places, they are responsible;
therefore if I quote authority from outside of myself, I can speak with
certainty about what I know and believe and no one can attack me. And
yet, my unique knowledge was not given and so my defense, my clutching
at security foiled my human need for conceptualization of and expression
of my own nurse vision of reality. This defeated the development by me
of nursing theory.
Now I realize how I underestimated the potentialities of my nursing
effect, of the difference I made, and could make. Just consider the
given human uniqueness of each participant in the nursing situation
whose familial potential goes back to an origin of thinking being or
consciousness, and forward to his anticipation of the future, his
eternity.
In the nursing literature, it is rather infrequent that we
philosophically share our innermost thoughts, dreams, ideals, and
strivings without a strong overlay of indoctrination or conversion.
Nietzsche presents philosophy as autobiographical, such sharing does not
offer maps. It could offer relevant resources and stimulate other nurses
to influence the shape and becoming of the profession.
This chapter attempts to discuss ideas of community, the macrocosm, by
considering man, the microcosm, as he develops in family and community.
The ideas represent my "here and now" as it reflects my past and
anticipated nursing world, including my hopes and expectations.