In retrospect, that paper has the marks of a hesitant beginning, restrained by cautious statements and supposedly protective references to existential literature. Dissatisfaction with it prompted further rethinking and revision. Searching through my files during this process, I found, to my great surprise, some notes on the dialogic nature of nursing written by myself three and six years previously. In fact, a three-year-old note contained the very title, "Dialogue Called Nursing"! Now, how is it possible to grasp a truth and then "forget" that one knows it and later meet and grasp the old truth again as new? The difference in these experiences of knowing, for me at least in this case, is that now I know as if from the inside out that nursing is dialogical. The idea seems to have sprouted out of the lived phenomenon, to have broken forth from the ground of experience, as opposed to having been concluded in my earlier "intellectual," "theoretical," or "philosophical" ponderings. But how did the earlier idea, the conclusion that nursing is dialogical, become a live option for me? Why did it appeal to me? How did it come to make sense in the first place if not because of my experience? The concept and the actual experience revitalize each other. Perhaps this is the value of an existentially grounded insight; it has a kind of durability resulting from its continuous rejuvenation by the interplay of experiencing and conceptualizing. Some old ideas are always new. In this spirit, this chapter looks again at humanistic nursing as lived dialogue. LIVED DIALOGUE The central insight (intuition or idea) from which this exploration grows is this: nursing itself is a form of human dialogue. I mean that the phenomenon of nursing, that is, the nurturing, intersubjective transaction, the event lived or experienced by the participants in the everyday world, is a dialogue. Much has been written about dialogue and, as the word is now in vogue, it is being used in different ways. Here, the term "dialogue" is used to denote a broader concept than the typical dictionary definition of dialogue as "a conversation between two or more persons or between characters in a drama or novel." It is used in the existential sense. It implies an "ontological sphere," in Buber's terms, or the "realm of being" to which Marcel refers. Here it refers to a _lived_ dialogue, that is, to a particular form of intersubjective relating. This may be understood in terms of seeing the other person as a distinct unique individual and entering into relation with him. In other words, nursing is a dialogical mode of being in an intersubjective situation. As in common usage, here also, the term "dialogue" implies communication, but in a much more general sense. It is not restricted to the notion of sending and receiving messages verbally and nonverbally. Rather, dialogue is viewed as communication in terms of call and response. {24}