The nurse's world is an experiential place for becoming influenced by each participant's "here and now" inclusive or origin, history, and hopes, fears, and alternatives of the confronting future. Positivistic science focuses on selected particulars. Henri Bergson says:
"... for us conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and live the intervals themselves."[8]
Each human participant in the nursing situation has a unique flow of consciousness which is intersubjectively influential.
So as human nurses we are limited in our ability to express the reality of our-lived worlds. Yet, also, this world depends on and demands that we, as human nurses, give it meaning, understand it in accordance with our { 69} humanness. Will and Ariel Durant, historians, professionals who are forced to selectively present the world for other humans, say:
"The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it: let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death."[9]
Humans are the only beings conscious of themselves. Nurses are human beings. As such we are capable of looking at our existence, choosing our values, giving our world meaning and of constantly transcending ourselves, or becoming more. If we value and prize our human nursing world and our human potential for consciousness and expression, we will actuate our potential and conceptualize our human nurse-world. This suggests questions to me. What do I want nursing to be? How can I influence the meaning of the term, nursing? How committed am I? What investment am I willing to make? Will I risk exploring and saying what I see in my nursing world? Am I open to knowing? How can I actuate my uniqueness to allow the realistic potential of my nursing profession to become, become ever more? Am I contributing my "nursing here and now" to nursing's history through a lasting form of expression? Of what importance is what I think or say; do I make any difference? Hermann Hesse says of each man's uniqueness:
"... every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again."[10]