Now I realize how I underestimated the potentialities of my nursing effect, of the difference I made, and could make. Just consider the given human uniqueness of each participant in the nursing situation whose familial potential goes back to an origin of thinking being or consciousness, and forward to his anticipation of the future, his eternity. In the nursing literature, it is rather infrequent that we philosophically share our innermost thoughts, dreams, ideals, and strivings without a strong overlay of indoctrination or conversion. Nietzsche presents philosophy as autobiographical, such sharing does not offer maps. It could offer relevant resources and stimulate other nurses to influence the shape and becoming of the profession. This chapter attempts to discuss ideas of community, the macrocosm, by considering man, the microcosm, as he develops in family and community. The ideas represent my "here and now" as it reflects my past and anticipated nursing world, including my hopes and expectations. Man's Experience Each human being carries a view of persons, families, and communities shaded by the views of his nuclear family. The past usually is corrected; it is never erased. So in his family of origin man internalizes ideas of "right-wrong," "appropriate-inappropriate," "expected-unexpected." Each family's shaded world echoes its procreators' familial, psychosocialeconomic, religious and experiential breadth, closely resembled or distorted. Two persons, perhaps more, usually husband and wife, bring shaded views together in some combination or balance that becomes the "stuff," the authority, of {41} their children's worlds. Thus, children see their early worlds through the complementariness and conflict of this initial home view, acting at times with it; at times against it. Adults, in response to and through one another, procreate new sensitive beings whom they want and/or do not want and whom they may and/or may not experience as their responsibility in varying degrees. Marcel, a French existentialist philosopher, views procreation and responsible parenthood as quite different. My past nursing experience substantiates this. Marcel expresses my bias about responsible parenthood, and this statement is also worthy of consideration by nurses in positions of authority to others. He says, "We have to lay down the principle that our children (or those for whom we care) are destined, as we are ourselves, to render a special service, to share in a work, we have humbly to acknowledge that we cannot conceive of this work in its entirety and that _a fortiori_ we are incapable of knowing or imagining how it is destined to shape itself for the young will, it is our province to awaken to a consciousness of itself."[5] Think of this statement of responsible authority. How has it been evidenced in families and nursing situations of your nursing world? What are your expectations of your patients or nurses with whom you work?