The Life We’ve Learned With—Nursing Theory—Our Past, Our Future

There is a scene in The Natural ( Johnson & Levinson, 1984 ), a film based on the 1952 novel by Bernard Malamud, where the main character, Roy Hobbs, reveals how baffled he is about how his life has turned out. As a youth, Roy possessed a natural talent for baseball that almost got him to the big leagues. His perplexity, when we see it in the film, reflects his undeveloped, juvenile grasp of his own talent and his trivial lifegoals that were never connected in a meaningful way to the world at large. His childhood sweetheart, Iris, consoles him at that moment by providing a different way to think about his life. “You know Roy, I believe we have two lives,” Iris says. “How…what do you mean?” “The life we learn with and the life we live after that.”