As a new year starts, we reflect on our lives, and what new things we would add to our lives. To pursue a common interest with my daughter -- I have taken up quilting. My grandmother quilted, and I treasure the battered piece of stitchery my Mom kept over the years. It is part of my heritage. As I begin this new endeavor, I am struck with how a quilt easily becomes a metaphor for nursing.
There are many types of quilts--patterned quilts, those lovely results of an organized approach to quilting, have a color scheme and uniform design of each block. But another common type is the "crazy" quilt, also called "scrap quilting."
If you haven't tried quilting, these acts of love are wonderfully diverse and creative. Using small pieces of fabric, maybe even scraps from another project, is practical. Our forebears were the original recylers!
Once completed, the whole of the quilt is really much more than the sum of its parts. I appreciate this as I join the blocks together and find that the display of the fabric and design is so much more pleasing than each individual block appeared.
So, as I quilted, I had a flash of insight that likened my crazy quilt to a perspective on nursing. Like a crazy quilt, nursing is an act of love. The types of things we do and our motivation for doing them -- to improve the well-being of those we serve and their loved ones -- is, I believe, motivated by love for others, and respect for ourselves.
Like a crazy quilt, nursing is practical. We nurses use everything we have-maybe just a scrap of a skill or leftover emotional reserve from a demanding day as well as our physical energy and our intellect. We, too, recycle. Sometimes it is the still clean or sterile parts of a dressing tray that will be useful in another situation. Sometimes it is information or insight one patient gives us that will benefit someone else we encounter.
Nursing is diverse-that quality in a crazy quilt that makes it even more beautiful! We represent every color, every culture. A relatively new trend is the addition of many who are coming to nursing as a second career. We have accountants and those with other business skills, teachers and health educators, and those wonderful women and men who worked at home, caring for their children until they were old enough for kindergarten.
Besides making nursing's quilt more beautiful, diversity strengthens us all!
A crazy quilt is a good place to use those not-so-gorgeous fabrics that your grandmother did not choose for her Sunday best dress. Similarly, in nursing some of us are experts in one aspect, some in others. Some of us are leaders and some prefer to follow. The glory of the quilt is that the "neutrals," the background fabrics and the colors allow some of the blocks to stand out, while others support the effort. As we draw to our profession people who might not have considered nursing in the past, know that crazy quilts represent love and practicality and diversity-just what we need to fashion the beautiful and durable quilt which is 21st century nursing.
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