“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” ~ Friedrick Nietzsche.

One of the joys of retirement is that road trips can be the way to get to far distant events.  This also means that routines are disrupted, and Friday morning messages are late! Which is the case this morning, as I arrived in a cool, rainy northern town late at night, and wake up this morning disoriented!

When I returned to school to obtain my bachelor’s of science degree in nursing, I did so as I was turning 50.  I had been reluctant to do so, based on a mistaken belief that I already knew all there was to know about nursing (who doesn’t, after they have been nursing for almost 30 years?).  Why not do something totally different then, maybe a creative writing degree, or, hey, why not change career altogether?  I had all manner of reasons not to go back to school, one of which was the fact that my formal education had taken place outside of the US (some in Jamaica, some in the UK), and only the private colleges and universities (i.e. more expensive) would accommodate.

Nevertheless I persisted.  Which in a way is strange enough, for at each step of the way I could have decided not to bother.  After all, I was already in management, there was no one telling me that it was required of me to have a degree.  But I also knew that if I ever wanted to move outside of my current employment, I would probably not be able to advance upwards.

The delightful thing, once I had overcome the hurdles, was that every day in class, and in the wonderful textbooks I had to buy, I learned something new about nursing, or about life.  And I obtained the tools to transition over to teaching, a career I came to love as much as I have always loved nursing. One article that we were made to read, in our early days in a class entitled ‘The nurse as student’, was one that resonated with all of us in the class, a mixture of ages, races and experience.  The author compared Erikson’s stages of the psychosocial development of children to the stages that adults (in this case nurses) go through when they go back to school.  There is the first stage of trust versus mistrust: who is this professor to think she knows more than me?  She’s younger than me! What about the others in the class? They will expect me to know more since I have more experience than them.  This led to the next stage of ‘autonomy versus shame and doubt’: ‘I’d better not speak up in class, or else they will know that I don’t know the answer to this question.  How could I not know about this when I’ve been a nurse for 30 years?’

Fortunately, as the author predicted, we could work through the stages and eventually get comfortable with each other and the process, and once we had opened ourselves to the possibilities, we could benefit tremendously from the experiences we brought to the classroom, and the advances made in the discipline and theories of nursing. 

Erikson’s stages then became something I had to teach to practical nursing students, who can go from a high school education to a practicing, bedside nurse in twelve short months.  Not only must they learn about anatomy and physiology, they must also learn about medications and the human response to such medications.  They are taught about pediatrics, obstetrics, psychiatric nursing and geriatrics.  Quite a lot to pack in to twelve months! But it was in teaching these courses that I learnt more than I had learnt in my own nursing program, and understood more theory than in all of my nursing practice.  And my recent courses in the BSN program came in handy.

When teaching about human growth and development, I encountered Erikson’s stages.  I don’t remember if I had learned about him in nursing school, but when I had to teach it, I had to dig deeper, and relate it to my own experiences.  Which made me question everything about myself as a parent.  Autonomy versus shame.  Had I neglected to promote autonomy in my toddlers by shouting at them when they tried to do something on their own?  As a young, night-shift working mother, it was hard to be patient, to allow kids to try it for themselves.  Far easier to take over, irritated, let me do that.  But how do kids learn, if it is not by trying over and over again, until, finally triumphant: ‘I did it!’. 

I recently went to lunch with someone I had not spent time with before, but it was one of those connections where you feel as if you have known them forever.  We were talking about dysfunctional families, and the damage that is done when kids grow up feeling shame, especially when there are secrets, painful secrets left undiscussed that are tamped down, covered over, however they remain in the background with the potential to erupt years later.  We discussed the condition of narcissism, one which apparently has its basis in deep shame learned in childhood, which forces the child to project a whole different reality onto their life, one of pride, arrogance, misplaced confidence in their own abilities, but worst of all, a total lack of empathy for others. 

I have been thinking recently of the difficulty this country has in accepting, confronting, healing from its own childhood, its own history.  When we consider the birth of the nation of the USA, it was created through acts of rape and destruction.  The indigenous people that were encountered living all across this beautiful land were seen and treated as savages.  When the white man conquered and possessed the land, they kidnapped, raped and abused Africans for four hundred years, to provide the free labor necessary to tame the land and create wealth.  When slavery was abolished, they created a system to ensure that classes of citizens were maintained in subjugation, despite the lofty words of the constitution which declared all men to be equal.  This history is shameful, and painful to read about, in all its details. 

Over the past few decades, we have been forced to admit that this union, this beautiful experiment, this coming together of people from around the world, is less than perfect.  That the sins of racism are still visited on current generations and are on full display in the present administration.  And rather than confronting and correcting the sins of the past, history is being whitewashed; museum sections are being closed; pages are being rewritten, all to avoid making those descended from the perpetrators feel uncomfortable.

If we are human we all should feel ashamed of the atrocities committed by any human against another human being.  But that shame should propel us to correct, not to hide.  To lay open, not to keep secret.  To allow wounds to air and heal, not to cover up so they fester.  As any addict knows, the key to recovery begins in acceptance, accepting that you need to change.

This Friday morning I hope that we can all face our shadow side and embrace it.  We are all imperfect, but have the ability to change, to grow, to correct.  I read a beautiful quote, but no idea where I found it: we should ‘…respond to chaos and injustice with unwavering love…’ and hope that we can do that.  Another pundit recommends that we embrace a ‘radical empathy’ to overcome cruel and inhumane treatment of others.  We can be the bridges, we can build networks, we can do better.

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.