We have our dear heads. Thank God for them! Let us each one of us be a living member, according to her several ability. It is the individual that signifies—rather than the law or the rule.
Has not every one who has experience of the world been struck by this: you may have the most admirable circumstances and organisations and examinations and certificates, yet, if the individual allows herself to sink to a lower level, it is all but a “tinkling cymbal” for her. It is how the circumstances are worked that signifies. Circumstances are opportunities.
Rules may become a dead letter. It is the spirit of them that “giveth life.” It is the individual, inside, that counts, the level she is upon which tells. The rest is only the outward shell or envelope. She must become a “rule of thought” to herself through the Ruler.
And on the other hand, it strikes you often, as a great man has said, if the individual finds herself afterwards in less admirable circumstances, but keeps her high level, and rises to a higher and a higher level still—if she makes of her difficulties, her opportunities—steps to ascend—she commands her circumstances; she is capable of the best Nursing work and spirit, capable of the best influence over her Patients.
It is again, what the individual Nurse is and can do during her living training and living work that signifies, not what she is certified for, like a steam-boiler, which is certified to stand so much pressure of work.
She may have gone through a first-rate course, plenty of examinations, and we may find nothing inside. It may be the difference between a Nurse nursing, and a Nurse reading a book on Nursing. Unless it bear fruit, it is all gilding and veneering: the reality is not there, growing, growing every year. Every Nurse must grow. No Nurse can stand still. She must go forward or she will go backward every year.
And how can a Certificate or public Register show this? Rather, she ought to have a moral “Clinical” Thermometer in herself. Our stature does not grow every year after we are “grown up.” Neither does it grow down. It is otherwise with our moral stature and our Nursing stature. We grow down, if we don’t grow up, every year.
At the present time, when there are so many Associations, when periodicals and publicity are so much the fashion, when there is such a dragging of everything before the public, there is some danger of our forgetting that any true Nursing work must be quiet work—an individual work. Anything else is contrary to the whole realness of the work. Where am I, the individual, in my inmost soul? What am I, the inner woman called “I”? That is the question.
This “I” must be quiet yet quick; quick without hurry; gentle without slowness, discreet without self-importance. “In quietness and in confidence must be her strength.”
I must be trustworthy, to carry out directions intelligently and perfectly, unseen as well as seen; “unto the Lord” as well as unto men; no mere eye service. (How can this be if she is a mere Association Nurse, and not an individual Nurse?)