Diversity and Becoming: Implications of Human Existence as Coexistence

Abstract

Better ways of understanding and working with human diversity are needed in the healthcare and human service disciplines. Nursing, as the discipline that cares for whole persons throughout their lives and meets people where they are, is ideally suited to provide leadership to this effort. In this column, the author explores human diversity by explicating human existence as coexistence, with implications for nursing. The author locates his worldview within the human becoming school of thought. Human diversity and human existence as coexistence are explored within this context, with implications for nursing as a discipline identified. Ideas that are crucial in the explication of human existence as coexistence are difference, imagination, creativity, and wholeness.