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The Importance of Temporality for Nursing Science and Professional Practice

Throughout my career I have been concerned with the meaningfulness of life, an understanding that I have directly related to temporality and the relationship that an individual has with time. My ideas developed from a study of Rogers’ (1970) conceptualization of the science of unitary human beings and an extension of this conceptualization that I labeled the life perspective rhythm model (Fitzpatrick, 1983). My original clinical practice was focused on individuals who are suicidal, persons for whom life, in its present form, no longer held meaning. As a clinician I was concerned that those I was caring for had lost their focus on presentness and had drifted to a future existence that they knew had to be better than the pain and agony that they were experiencing in life. Thus, they were choosing to end their lives in order of the linear clock time perspective given the value orientations and caregiving activities inherent in nursing. He proposed that this temporal component differentiated nursing science from other healthcare sciences. Jones (2001) introduced the compelling concept of “nursing time” (p. 153) to represent the holistic, complex, and individualistic perspectives of nurses. Similarly, Peterson (1987) distinguished the nurse-patient relationship as having a present temporal focus on the “thereness” and “thru time” experiences of patients, in contrast to the more common future focus on “outcomes and endtime” (p. 73) in healthcare. She described both existential and economic benefits on patient care and satisfaction from this present temporal orientation. The therapeutic value of a present temporal focus was demonstrated more recently in a report by Welch (2007) who, along with several other researchers, has studied the nursing phenomenon of taking life day-by-day as a dimension of health and quality of life. The present orientation toward patients conveyed in these conceptions of nursing time align with postmodern views of Rorty (1999, 2006) and other pragmatist philosophers. Their philosophic views emphasize the temporal over the universal, and support inquiry that seeks the therapeutic over the truthful, and coping over knowing. This temporal perspective in inquiry is reflected by nurse researchers who shine their lights on the presentness of people’s lives, well or ill, at work or play, to learn more of the human potential for meaningfulness and well-being.