It’s more difficult to eradicate than MRSA and as common as the common cold. I’m referring, of course, to village virus. If you’re not aware of it, it’s probably because
Main Street isn’t required reading as much as it used to be. Authored by Sinclair Lewis, the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,
Main Street depicts the everyday lives of residents of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, USA, and satirizes the mind-sets of people everywhere who worship the status quo and call it progress. In Chapter 13, Guy Pollock informs Carol Kennicott, the book’s main character, that he has contracted the village virus, “the germ which—it’s extraordinarily like the hookworm—attacks ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces.”
It often presents with a this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it mentality and is sometimes accompanied by staring at those who’ve taken the road less traveled and, as a result, developed immunity. I may have detected its presence just this week in a small town newspaper’s “meet your neighbor” profile. When the responder was asked to identify interesting places she had visited or lived, she observed, “I’m not a traveler; I’m a homebody,” this in juxtaposition with a follow-up question about whom she admired most: “Any person who has a dream and goes for it!” Was it just my imagination, or was there regret tucked in between those lines?
It’s hard to say when it comes to the village virus, because it’s possible to be virus-free and never to have gone beyond the city limits. (More typically, a person afflicted with village virus finds comfort in the sign marking the edge of town, thinking it must have been put there for a reason.) On the other hand, it’s possible to be a world traveler and still have a terminal case of the “villages” because its presence—or lack of it—is determined not by where your feet are, but where your head and heart are.
How do you fight village virus? 1) By working at creating a legacy of personal leadership, as Karen Morin, president of the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI), points out in her column. 2) By choosing leadership, as Patricia Thompson, chief executive officer of STTI, discusses in her column. (It’s up to you, she says.) 3) By encouraging yourself, as Tiffany Montgomery suggests in a recent post to her blog, “Taking hold of my dreams.” 4) By embracing change, as mentioned by Karien Jooste in “Stepping stones,” the newest member of RNL’s family of blogs.
Jooste, a former member of RNL’s International Advisory Board, teaches nursing management and leadership at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. When I asked her to consider writing a blog for Reflections on Nursing Leadership, she expressed surprise, told me she would give it some thought and then agreed to write a blog that, among other things, focuses on reflective leadership. The result is “Stepping stones: Searching for ways to make the world of nursing a better place, one step at a time.”
As she prepares to participate in next week’s Annual Nursing Education Conference in Sun City, in South Africa’s North West Province—the theme is Change!—Jooste asks: “When we move in a new direction, the most fundamental tenets of what we believe and value are often challenged, and may even change to a certain extent. Conversely, some elements of our former perspectives of leadership remain and continue to guide our actions. We can never cut all ties with a previous perspective in favour of a new one. Or could we?”
Good question, and definitely not the kind of query people with village virus like to hear! RNL
