Each Nurse: A Noetic Locus
Each nurse is a “knowing place.” It feels as if my greatest talents, as a human nurse person, awaited my acceptance that came through as I related to the existentialist thinking of persons like Martin Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Frederick Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Hermann Hesse, Wilfrid Desan, and Norman Cousins. Now when I think of the phenomena—man, family, community—Theresa G. Muller, nurse educator and clinician, who quoted Hersey from his novel, A Single Pebble, comes to mind.[3] He said, “I approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand.” I consider my greatest gifts as a human being nurse my ability to relate to other man, to wonder, search, and imagine about my experience, and to create out of what I come to know. My ever developing internalized community of world thinkers dynamically interrelated with my conscious awareness of my experienced nursing realm allows my appreciation of my human gifts and the ever enrichment of myself as a “knowing place.”