This metaphoric synthetic construct, "all-at-once," has allowed me to better convey how I experience the health nursing situation. It also has aided my understanding of the multifarious multiplicity of angular views expressed by several professionals in responding to and describing a similar situation. I can accept each description as truth for each responder. Each responds with his uniqueness in the situation. Comparing, contrasting, and complementarily synthesizing these multiple views inclusive of their inconsistencies and contradictions, none negating the other, allows a better understanding of man-in-his-world in the health situation than the so frequently presented oversimplifications. These oversimplified presentations usually deal only with what is occurring that is important to the particular interests of the reporter. And they are offered only after the selected material has been put through a process of interpretation and logical sequencing to emphasize the reporter's particular point. In such reporting the existent in the situation labeled unimportant, unacceptable, or unrelated is not considered. Such existents, nonetheless, may control the patients, the families, the nurses and health professionals generally. Their control may well be more powerful than any erudite oversimplification or its presentation. Humanistic nursing practice theory in asking for phenomenological descriptions of the nurse's lived-world of experiencing proposes authentic awareness with the self of what is existent in the situation prior to conceptualization for dispersal. Unless nurses appreciate and give recognition to the dynamic meaningful breadth, depth, and future influence of their worlds the actualization of the potential thrust of the nursing professional will never be or become. A THEORY OF NURSING A human nurse nurses through a clinical process of "I-Thou, I-It, all-at-once to comfort." {112} "I-Thou" is a coming to know the other and the self in relation, intuitively. "I-It" is an authentic analyzing, synthesizing, and interpreting of the "I-Thou" relation through reflection. The "all-at-once" symbolizes the multifarious multiplicities of extremes (incommensurables, criticals, nonconsequentials, contradictions, and inconsistencies) as metaphorically representative of what exists in the nurse's world. "Comfort" is a state valued by a nurse as an aim in which a person is free to be and become, controlling and planning his own destiny, in accordance with his potential at a particular time in a particular situation. FOOTNOTES: [1] Josephine G. Paterson, "A Perspective on Teaching Nursing: How Concepts Become," in _A Conceptual Approach to the Teaching of Nursing in Baccalaureate Programs_, a report of a project directed by Rose M. Herrera (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, School of Nursing, 1973), pp. 17-27.