So each human person, each nurse, as a microcosm, could make a difference. Reflecting on the lived worlds of nurses, their communities, if we use Plato's philosophical analogy of macrocosm-microcosm, despite the varieties of situation, we can make meaningful a basic concept of community. Such a concept utilized by a nurse to view her particular ongoing changing world can help her to understand more realistically, survive within, and strugglingly participate as a quality force. To be a quality force within community a nurse must open her being to the endless innovative possibilities and unattempted choices available to her. {38} The ability to thus open one's self requires our exposing our biases, the shades through which we regard the world, to the sunlight. In nursing our shades often are closed categories, labels, diagnoses, trite superficial hackneyed expressions learned by us, taught to us as fact, taken in unexamined, and left unreexamined despite other changes in ourselves and our situations. Socrates said, and it still holds, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Our shades can be cherished concepts, beliefs that guide us automatically rather than thoughtfully. Whether they are entirely myth or partial truths, they can cause us agonizing dilemma because they obscure the obviously relevant and the possibilities beyond. A concept of community, if grasped and if a nurse is truly consciously aware, can help her to understand how her nursing world has evolved, is presently, and how she can be, to shape its future in accordance with her values.