PHENOMENON OF COMMUNITY
Humanistic nursing creates, happens within, and is affected by community. This chapter will discuss the abstract term "community." To stimulate thought on a nurse's influence on community, consideration will be given to three points: (1) my angular view of community and its evolvement, (2) how man has considered community over time, (3) how a human being comes to be through community.
MY ANGULAR VIEW
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?
HISTORY: THE SHADES OF MY WORLD, BRACKETED
In years past as a public health mental health psychiatric nurse I have structured facts about man, family, and community precisely for presentation. Approaching the data sociopsychologically I framed it in the public health model of promotion of health, prevention of illness, treatment, rehabilitation, and maintenance. I thought of family sociologically as nuclear, procreative, and extended. In accordance with the psychoanalytic model, family members were oral, anal, oedipal, latent, homosexual, adolescent, heterosexual, and/or mature. Community, like person and family, was considered according to a {39} closed paradigm, ranging from ideal to abysmal, from the smallest to the largest unit in which persons congregated for common purposes. I selected from experience nursing examples to make these sociopsychological public health constructs meaningful. I did not start from nursing experiences to come up with nursing concepts of man, family, and community. I denied my particular self as a source of knowledge of these areas. Had education programmed me to value only others' ideas gleaned in the classroom or from books? I projected this devaluation of my own ideas onto my colleagues and until I really knew them gave them what I thought they wanted, others' ideas. Presently I prize my uncertainty about the nature of man in family and community and my striving toward an ever explorative process of being and becoming, available for surprise. Paradoxically, I believe it was these very same capacities, uncertainty and striving, that compelled my superimposing on my colleagues with certainty other persons' and other professions' views. Actually, my certainty about the conundrums: man, family, community come only in particulars and only in fits and starts, and my certainty is at once a truth and a nontruth. I see my aim as ever striving toward certainty while constantly wrestling with the discomfort of uncertainty.