Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment

Editorial
National Board of Peruvian Nursing Journal
“RECIEN“, Peruvian Board of Nurses.
VOL.9 / N ° 2
August 30, 2020
Peruvian Nursing Day
Special Issue

Nursing Leadership During COVID-19

Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment
© Watson, J., 2020

‘There is no hiding place down here … do not turn your face away’.
~Maya Angelou

Prologue:

The 2020 year of the COVID-19 Pandemic is one and the same as the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. This is the year we all will remember, as the year we are stopped in our tracks. 2020, the year we had to face the underside of a ‘world that is too much with us’ – threatening human-planetary health and survival Itself. We cannot turn our face away.

This time is an invitation for nursing leadership to come of age for a new consciousness, in harmony with the call for new visionary, conscious leadership for nursing and Human/Planet healing/health/survival. This is a time to honor Peruvian Nursing historic leader Santa Rosa de Lima and continue its mission as it celebrates Peruvian National Nursing Day, August 30, 2020.

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Perhaps it is no coincidence that 2020 is the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife.

COVID-19 Pandemic calls forth and advances the finest of what international nursing and midwifery have always offered to humanity and Planet Earth. Such crises of humanity call forth nursing leadership to give voice and articulate its timeless covenant with global humanity, to sustain caring/healing/health for all.

2020 Pandemic year has brought the world face-to-face with what nurses have faced since before Nightingale and beyond. That is: facing the depth of human suffering, sorrow, illness, despair, pain, loss, grief, death, dying; and fear and threats associated with such; including individual and diverse cultural meanings and responses to life/death and all-in-betweens.

Here is where nursing steps in and resides, consciously, intentionally, tending to all care aspects of human/family/community/Mother Earth, honoring our shared humanity on the planet. This is why Peruvian Nurses are celebrating, since 1955, Santa Rosa de Lima in honor of its National Nursing Day.

It is here that across time and through history of nursing leaders and legends, that nursing locates itself. It does so not only in its history, but now, in this current Pandemic time Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment with knowledge, dignity and wisdom for informed moral action or praxis of caring/healing/wholeness – honoring the sanctity of death, in the midst of life. Honoring and tending to the full life-death spectrum, the inevitable sacred wheel of life.

But such conscious visionary nursing in Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment, has been hidden, unseen, because, not looked for, cloistered away behind the hospital walls and institutional, bureaucratic medical-technical treatment glare. Perhaps it is because it happens in Just Like This – This Now – in This One Moment, that it is difficult for even nurses to see and name.

“That is just what we do” is often nurses refrain, leaving these Just Like This – This Now – This One Moments unnamed and unclaimed and invisible; longing to be seen, honored, recognized and affirmed beyond ad hoc, momentary unconscious practices. That is why we need conscious evolved nursing leaders who can name, honor and create voice, language and informed moral social/planetary action for the Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment. This moment of global nursing — transcending time, touching and sustaining the burning, life-blood of humanity/our Divine Mother.

Nightingale reminded us we need passion, intellect, moral ideals and a place to put them to use. Now – Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment is the time for such directions for caring/healing and whole person/whole Planet health for all.

COVID-19 Pandemic – Nursing and ‘Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment…’

In spite of the challenges of COVID-19, and in the midst of the Pandemic, what has emerged is attention to what matters. When all is said and done and there is nothing and everything between the patient and the nurse except their shared humanity, there is the ‘Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment’, which may be all there is.

In this Just Like This – This Now – One Pandemic Moment resides the transpersonal caring moment (Watson, 1988); it holds the nurse’s evolved loving-kindness consciousness, commitment and devotion to caring. For this one person in This One Moment, it is Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment which transcends time, space, and physicality and affects the nurse and patient/family as long as they live, and through and beyond death and dying.

In this Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment there is the nurse leader’s consciousness of caring as a sacred act; there, in this Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment, is the nurse practicing the 10 Caritas Processes® (Watson, 2008, 2018), universals of human caring, and living out timeless eternal values of the highest good for all: Veritas Praxis (Eupraxis) (Watson, 2018).

Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment – the Conscious Visionary Pandemic Nurse Leader is:

  • Embracing the practice of loving-kindness, compassion and service to self as well as to patient/family; community; tending self-caring as the first principle of caring and compassion with others. The nurse leader is working on healing his/her relations with self/other; embracing human suffering as part of sacred circle of life/death; finding new meaning in life itself; ‘remembering purpose’ (Biley, 2019).
  • Inspiring faith and hope when, and where, there is despair; inviting transcendence and sacred presence; honoring divinity and beliefs of other, beyond egoic self; allowing for prayer, rituals, ceremonies, indigenous practices that inspire and in-spirit patients/families/communities/loved ones.
  • Trusting transpersonal higher self; offering trust, where there is no-trust; staying within the other’s subjective frame of reference for meaning and inner experience, when all others are focusing on outer disease, diagnosis, procedures, tasks or treatment of the body physical. Where there is a lack of trust through chaos; the many unknown, unnamed, sterile, institutional hospital personnel, coming and going, there is the conscious visionary nurse/leader Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment establishing a trusting transpersonal relationship through a look, a touch, a non-verbal hand gesture, a silent transpersonal presence, a soothing voice, a calming and soothing spirit, lingering long after the conscious intentional nurse/leader has left the room.
  • Nurturing Transpersonal Caring Relationship through authentic compassionate heart-to-heart, spirit-to-spirit connection – attending to dynamic pattern and rhythm of self/other; the conscious nurse-self is there with Caritas presence as the instrument of caring/healing. The conscious visionary nurse/leader is there with gifts of self to attend to; to fulfill sensitive, kind acts of comfort, of simple requests — responding to what is needed in the moment to nurture and support the other.
  • Forgiving self and other allowing expression of positive and negative feelings; non-judgmentally holding sacred, safe space, silence, pausing, listening to and accepting another’s story for meaning; realizing this one moment is all there is; knowing I may be the only one to hear their story; realizing, listening to another’s story may be the finest healing gift. Where there is fear and unknowns within and without, there is the one moment of the conscious nurse, quietly listening to the patient, family, allowing for expression of negative and positive feelings as an emotional and spiritual release – and being present, listening to story as a healing act itself.
  • Deepening creativity and creative self through solution-seeking; transcending conventional patterns and responses to problems; drawing upon, honoring cultural and individual diversity; the conscious visionary nurse is calling upon the finest of all ways and forms of knowing for fullness of Being and Deciding. Where there is lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, masks, and medical equipment and supplies, there is the Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment, where the creative conscious nurse leader is problem solving; creating new novel approaches and solutions; innovating and improvising; finding new ways to assist with breathing, relaxing, balancing of patient’s energy field; helping patient access their own inner healer, with and through machinery and technology.
  • Balancing teaching and learning for individual/patient/family needs; calming teaching, educating families and communities; balancing facts/information with meaning, understanding and wisdom; coaching individuals and groups in self-caring, self-knowledge, self-control and self-healing, preventive and healthful practices for highest good for all. The conscious, visionary nurse/leader educator knows that every human being needs to be seen – to be heard — and to know they matter and what they think and say matters.
  • Co-creating a Healing environment at all levels; appreciating pattern; repatterning the energetic field; being the Caritas field of love and kindness; developing new patterns of delivery of caring/healing that transcend institutional constraints and out-of-date patterns and mindsets. Where there is chaos, there is the visionary conscious nurse/leader repatterning the environment, including use of self as the environmental field, transcending all other distractions and barriers; a movement, a photo, a color, a work of art, a poem, a dance twirl – inviting full use of self, in the one moment as a healing art – finding ways to touch the patient’s spirit affecting the person’s body, emotions, and mind as one.
  • Ministering reverentially by assisting with basic needs of self/other as a sacred ministration; sustaining dignity and integrity; offering sacred service through touching of mindbodyspirit as one. When and where there is no human skin-to-skin touch, there is the nurse’s energetic healing, non-contact/loving presence touch; providing human compassionate eye contact, as a healing gaze, a soft melodic voice. Where there is the patient in need of basic care, there is the nurse in the Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment offering tender loving care as a sacred act — maybe one of the greatest gifts we can offer to humanity, when in need.

And it is here in the Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment that the Conscious Visionary Nurse/Leader is:

  • Opening to Infinity – for spiritual, existential mysterious unknowns, allowing for and accepting miracles as part of the life/death cycle and mystery of life and human experiences; open to co-mingling of spirit-science-soul where mystery lives, and miracles are invited and allowed. It is here, behind the scenes, opening to the other side of the thin veil of life/death, the conscious visionary nurse leader is witnessing and participating in miracles of life and death and all in-between; opening to infinity of the cosmic universe; participating in the great sacred circle of life itself. And the conscious visionary nurse/leader is offering her gifts of self-in-service to humanity and Mother Earth.
    • Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment, becomes the true miracle and mystery of Nursing and Leadership (Watson, 2008).
    • Where there is death — and there is now Death/Dying in many forms, and more and more death! — it is the conscious visionary nurse leader who is there, in the one-moment ushering in death as part of life, bringing it in from the shadows of our outer world reality as the sacred passage of the soul to light. It is here, in this in-between-space of nurse/leader dedication, where nurses are literally dying through humble service, awakening the public and the profession of the reality of pandemic risks.
    • Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment is the nurse/leader attending to the dying and the family as a sacred act, finding the kindest and most loving and creative ways to sustain human touch and dignity; not allowing a patient to die alone. And after death there is the One Moment of tending to the body as a sacred act, on behalf of the patient, family, self and system. And when all is said and done, in the Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment the conscious nurse/leader is consoling the family and loved one, the staff and self through sorrow, sadness, grief and grieving – crying with and for self/other as part of the same experience.

We are facing a new unitary worldview requiring an evolved consciousness, for an unknown future. Evolved, conscious visionary nurses and nurse leaders are called to articulate and act on, the timeless, universal values, philosophy and theories of the discipline of nursing.

Just Like This – This Now – This One Moment, lies nursing’s dormant call to social/moral justice, to caring literacy, to a leap into a quantum consciousness; an awakening to nursing as informed moral, eu/praxis as a form of ‘sacred activism’; nurse leaders as spiritual existential advocates for global humanity and public health/environmental health as health for all.

Just Like This – This Now – In This One Eternal Moment conscious visionary nurse leaders are the midwives for Human/Planet Health, healing and forgiving past errors of humanity. Finally we enter the open portal to the future. Nursing wakes up; stands in place as the Universal ageless archetypal Priestess for humanity/Mother Earth.

When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in his hand.

(Just)
Like This
(Now)

~Rumi

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REFERENCES

Angelou, Maya (1994) On the Pulse of Morning. The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. NY: Random House Inc.

Biley, A. (2019). Birds Hold Our Secrets. Boulder, CO: Lotus Library. Watson Caring Science Institute.

Rumi Like This.

Watson, J. (1988). Human Caring Science. Boston: Appleton Century.

Watson, J. (1999). Postmodern Nursing and Beyond. NY: Elsevier.

Watson, J. (2006). Caring Science as Sacred Science. Philadelphia: FA Davis.

Watson, J. (2008). Nursing. The Philosophy and Science of Caring. Boulder, University Press of Colorado.

Watson, J. (2018). Unitary Caring Science. Philosophy and Praxis of Nursing. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado.