Wisdom is something that comes, little by little, through a lot of listening.
Nursing demands vigilance about people. The sights and smells that a patient offers, their movements and their offhand comments all contribute crucial information to understanding what they need. Training and experience heighten one's ability to see what needs to be seen.
Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
I was taken to the hospital for observation. I stayed several days, didn't observe anything, and I left.
For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.
