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21 Words for Nurses is a collection of Meditations on words relevant to Nursing. They reflect ways of thinking about being and becoming a compassionate nurse. The quotations offered as thoughts for meditation are followed by enjoining comments by Young- Mason. It is intended as an inspirational companion for the nurse and includes key words such as compassion, age, knowledge, understanding, sorrow, and perspective.
This little book reveals the philosophies that together form the core of every compassionate and fulfilled nurse—the inspirations, dreams, compassion, dedication and spirituality impossible to acquire solely from a textbook or lab. By exploring the meaning of these everyday words to the nursing profession 21 Words gives every nurse thought-provoking inspiration and meditation. Quoted are notables Florence Nightingale, Confucius, Isabella Stewart, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Georges Bernanos to name a few.
Excerpts from 21 Words for Nurses © Young-Mason
AGE
…there is a wonder that only time can bestow. Age give to all things, objects, institutions, and individual lives, their value, their dignity, their worth. As a consequence, esteem should always turn upward to those who have gone ahead and stand before us.
Confucius
* * *
Nurses are intimate witnesses to the wonder and perplexities of age. Their esteem for the worth, the worth whileness, of the wisdom of age invites others to share that reverence.
JYM
ANGER
I have learnt through bitter experience one supreme lesson: to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
Gandhi
* * *
There is much that angers the nurse who witnesses unnecessary suffering, disease, and death caused by arrogance, incompetence, indifference, and neglect. But when the force of that deep anger becomes disciplined intervention at all levels of the community, it has the potential to humanize every aspect of the health care system.
JYM
POWER
All of us dwell on the brink of the infinite ocean of life’s creative power. We all carry it within us; supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted and cannot be destroyed. But it is hidden deep, which is what makes life a problem. The infinite is down in the darkest, profoundest vault of our being, in the forgotten well-house, the deep cistern. What if we could discover it again and draw from it unceasingly?
* * *
How can the nurse discover this hidden powerful self? Through desire and devotion to reading, reflection, the perspective of nature, the enlightenment of meaningful conversation, through deep friendship, through knowledge, through the experience of compassion.
JYM
WORLD
For the world is not atoms or molecules or radio-activity or other forces, the diamond is not carbon, and light is not vibrations of ether. You can never come to the reality of creation by contemplating it from the point of view of destruction.
Tagore
* * *
The world to the nurse is there to see, to know, to revere most positively in its plenitude; and each person is the life of that seeing and knowing and that plenitude.
JYM