The ability to be there, to stay involved in community with my fellows, is a problem worthy of concern to me as a nurse. How do I stay in an existential way with my contemporaries, patients, patients' families when their values in reality are so different from my own? How do I go beyond a negative judgmental to a prizing attitude that would open the possibility of seeing strengths in others' views perhaps lost, discarded, or never previously existent in my own? Nonsuperimposing of my own value system through recognizing and bracketing it is a difficult professional goal. And yet, a goal that if coupled with the courage for personal existence, could sustain me in the health-nursing community. { 48}
So for a health-nursing community to truly be actualized each nurse would prepare to be all it was possible for her to be as a nurse. Then, through exploration there would be a recognition of the reality of the existent community. Over time a merger of the values of the nurse and of the existing community would be reflected as moreness in each. The nurse would be more through her relation with the community; the community would be more through its relation with the nurse. Each would make an important difference in the other. The macrocosm, the community, would reflect the nurse's quality of presence. The microcosm, the nurse, would reflect the presence of the community with her. Each unique man becomes in community through communication with other uniquely different men.
[1] Plato, _The Republic_, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945).
[2] Wilfrid Desan, _Planetary Man_ (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972).
[3] John Hersey, _A Single Pebble_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 18.
[4] Hermann Hesse, _Steppenwolf_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 60.
[5] Gabriel Marcel, _Homo Viator_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, 1962), p. 121.
[6] Teilhard de Chardin, _The Phenomenon of Man_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961).
[7] Norman Kiell, _The Universal Experience of Adolescence_ (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), pp. 22-44.
[8] Martin Buber, _I and Thou_, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1958).