Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like-then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
-Jean Cocteau
Note: A reader emailed a request I write about bringing beauty and creativity to nursing practice. Here goes…
Nurse as Sisyphus by jparadisi 2012
Finding beauty and creativity in our daily lives is vital for happiness. Art is a path along which the breadcrumbs leading us to both are found. This statement seems pretentious in a society cutting the study of art (music, dance, literature, painting, and drawing) from its educational system, regarding it no more necessary than so much fat sucked away through liposuction. Access to art is also eroding: on a recent trip, my husband and I paid $15 each for admittance to an art museum. Without funding, art, like health care, may soon be accessible to a decreasing number of people.
Art is essential in bringing beauty and creativity to nursing practice because it provides the humanitarian tools needed to find self-worth in a job that is complex, and often overwhelming, with waves of life and death crashing over our heads. It’s easier to empty a bedpan if you consider Prometheus and his love of humanity while you clean. For other nursing tasks, the punishment of futility dealt to Sisyphus perhaps comes to mind more often. The longevity of Shakespeare’s plays speaks to their grasp of human psychology and motivation.
Art and literature provide archetypes we can apply to our modern lives. Excluding the arts from a life science curriculum leaves us searching for meaning without a compass. The ability to apply meaningful ideas from art and literature to our daily lives promotes sustainable happiness.
Connecting patient care to images from art and literature fuels my writing and painting. It protects me from burnout. I credit it with the fact I still love being a nurse twenty-five years after becoming one. In the words of James M. Barrie,
“It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.”
Hindsight is an exact science.
Guy Bellamy
In oncology, nurses are often faced with hanging chemotherapy, assisting with surgeries, or radiation treatments for grim diagnoses most likely to result in death anyway. Sometimes we wonder why treatment is offered. This week for TheONC, I ask these questions from nursing and artist perspectives in the post Gate Keepers.
TheONC is an online community for oncology professionals. Follow us on Twitter @The-ONC, and Like us on Facebook.
Be truthful, gentle, and fearless.
- Gandhi
From Cradle to Grave: The Color White, Charcoal, ink, watercolor on paper by jparadisi
Whether you’re an aspiring artist, writer, or cancer patient, support groups can offer encouragement and resources to help you on the journey. This week at TheONC, I write about unexpected pitfalls of support groups, and how to spot a healthy one in my post Support Groups: In Sickness and In Health.
Last week, TheONC posted my blog, Controlling Our Own Image. Identity is a theme I work with often both in paint, and words. I have some strong thoughts that it’s time nurses create the image we want the media to portray. The post received a flurry of well thought out comments. If you’re not a writer or artist, it’s worth thinking about how you can improve the image of nursing in your own practice.
TheONC is an online community for oncology health care providers to share information and resources. Follow us on Twitter @The_ONC and Like us on Facebook.
Happy Nurses Week!
Self-Portrait. Pencil on paper 2001 by jparadisi
Telling Our Stories to Benefit Others is my latest blog post for TheONC; the online community for oncology care teams. Registering for TheONC is free for oncology nurses.
Having the opportunity to write about creativity and its place in the oncology setting allows me to blog out loud the internal dialogues about painting, writing, and nursing I’ve had ever since I came out of the closet as an artist over a decade ago. I have found these words of Goethe’s true:
“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”
In my pursuit of living creatively, I frequently find magic in the convergence of science, humanity, and art. For instance, take this passage written by Peter Steinhart:
To draw anything you have to find a connection with it. You have to turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing. You have to let the object stir you to empathy or ennoblement or joy or compassion-even to fear. You must see that things are a part of your world in some special way before you can attend to them.
Now re-read the same passage, with a few simple changes:
To be a nurse, you have to find a connection with people. You have to turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing. You have to let patient care stir you to empathy or ennoblement or joy or compassion-even to fear. You must see that your patients are a part of your world in some special way before you can attend to them.
When making art, or practicing the art of nursing, it all boils down to focus and connection. Whichever you are doing today, find that focus and connection. Someone’s life will be better, because you did.
This week, I blog about Knitting and Communication for TheONC. It’s a confessional post about lacking the right words for a friend with cancer, and finding a way to communicate through the craft of knitting. Sometimes pushing through frustration is necessary in creativity and relationships.
TheONC is an online community for oncology health care teams. Follow on Twitter @The_ONC and Like us on Facebook!
photo: jparadisi 2012
1. One of my favorite things about being a nurse is my weird work schedule. For instance, today is Monday, but I worked the weekend. So, while many on Twitter bemoan Monday morning, I am in my jammies, drinking coffee. Outside, the steady fall of rain adds to the illusion of a leisurely Sunday morning. There’s something appealingly decadent about having time off when most people work. It almost makes up for the nights, weekends, and holidays I’ve worked the past twenty-five years.
Rain is the color of introspection, and grief.
2. A friend died last week. It was not unexpected, but it was a complex relationship, and there was no fairy tale ending. In an odd coincidence, earlier in the week I’d attended a book signing at a local bookstore. The author, Beth Howard, wrote Making Piece, a Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie (Harlequin, 2012) and blogs at The World Needs More Pie.
I tried Howard’s approach to healing through pie making. I have made pies since I was twelve. As my hands worked the pastry for an apple pie after work on Saturday, I realized I make pies for holidays or birthdays, but never as an event of its own, never just for myself. David and I skipped over dinner for dessert. It was the first time I enjoyed one of my pies warm from the oven.
I do feel better. Maybe the world does need more pie.
Yesterday I wrote about efforts to remove yellow Easter candy dye stains from my favorite pair of white jeans. Today I’m happy to report after four washings, heavy doses of Shout, and gentle touches of bleach, the jeans are restored to pristine status.
Had my efforts failed, however, I had a back up plan. I received this advice from a reader and pass it on to you:
Mix some laundry detergent with white vinegar and rub on stain. Let set – like over night.
Soak the stained area in white vinegar over night.
Wash.
Do not dry. Check stain.
Repeat.
If you have helpful stain removing tips, please share them in the comments. Stains of an unusual variety plague nurses regularly. We can use all the help we can get!
By the way, Visualizing Your Creative Life is my latest post included among this week’s blogs at TheONC. The suggestions are easily adapted for use by oncology patients too.
