Chapter 1 presents a discussion of key ideas that ground and

contextualize nursing as caring. The most fundamental idea is that of person as caring with nursing conceptualized as a discipline. Our understanding of this foundation has been seasoned both from within nursing and from outside the discipline, but always with the purpose of deepening our understanding of nursing. When we have gone outside the discipline to extend possibilities for understanding, we have made an effort to go beyond application, to think through the nursing relevance of ideas that seemed, on the surface, to be useful. Chapter I and subsequent chapters draw on Mayeroff's (1971) caring ingredients, including:

* Knowing--Explicitly and implicitly, knowing that and knowing how, knowing directly, and knowing indirectly (p. 14).

* Alternating rhythm--Moving back and forth between a narrower and a wider framework, between action and reflection (p. 15).

* Patience--Not a passive waiting but participating with the other, giving fully of ourselves (p. 17).

* Honesty--Positive concept that implies openness, genuineness, and seeing truly (p. 18).

* Trust--Trusting the other to grow in his or her own time and own way (p. 20).

* Humility--Ready and willing to learn more about other and self and what caring involves (p, 23).

* Hope--"An expression of the plentitude of the present, alive with a sense of a possible" (p. 26).

* Courage--Taking risks, going into the unknown, trusting (p. 27).

In Chapter 2, we present the theory in its most general form. We have resisted the temptation to include examples in this chapter for two reasons: first, because an example always seemed to lead to the need to further explain and illustrate; and second, because we wished to have a general expression of the theory, undelimited by particulars, and available to facilitate further theory development.