Continued)

EMOTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM

Suppose that when you first enter the ward you are wishing with all your
heart you had never decided to become a probationer. Perhaps the white
screen and its possible meaning has so frightened you that your thoughts
refuse to go beyond it. Suppose the very sight of so much sickness has
agitated you instead of strengthening your determination to help nurse
it. That is, suppose your emotions, your feelings, so fill your mind
that perception is necessarily inaccurate and blurred. Then tomorrow
your account of the ward will be hazy, and your desire will probably be
against returning to a place where so many unpleasant feelings were
aroused.

The emotional balance which refuses to allow feelings to obscure
judgment by leading reason astray is a necessary safeguard for the work
of the nurse. There is little place in the profession for the woman who
is "all sentiment," but perhaps there is less for the one without
sentiment.

Feeling, we found, is the first expression of mind--feeling which in the
early months is entirely selfish. The happiest baby you know is not
sweet and winning to please you, but because he feels comfortable and
happy and cannot keep from expressing it. His universe is his own little
self and you exist only in your relation to him. If you give him
pleasure he likes you; if pain, he does not want you. His mother often
fails to please him, but satisfies him so much more frequently than
anybody else that he loves her best. Then comes nurse or father--if he
proves the satisfactory kind of father, or she a nurse he can love. To
the baby whatever he happens to want is good. What is not desirable is
bad. And such emotional responses are altogether normal in early months,
yes, even until the child is old enough to use reason to choose between
two desires the one that will in the end prove more satisfying. But they
are defects in adult life.

The nurse who would always act as her first feeling dictates would not
be in training many days. Unpleasant sights and sounds, the fear of
making a mistake which might harm a patient, the undesirability of long
hours of hard work in caring for patients who frequently only find fault
with her best efforts, would early decide her in favor of another
life-work. Comparatively few so-called "grown-ups" are guided only by
feeling; and most of those are in institutions that are well
safeguarded. But a great many mature men and women allow f