Friday, November 21, 2008

Interesting Exchange with an INFP


INFP, The Healer, is the one that knows all about the battle of good and evil.

NANCY: Quote from Robert T. Allen
Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not remain so if you only perceive an ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without. Here is a youth hard pressed by poverty and labor. Confined long hours in an unhealthy workshop; unschooled and lacking all the arts of refinement. But he dreams of better things. He thinks of intelligence, or refinement, of grace and beauty. He conceives of, mentally builds up, an ideal condition of life. The wider liberty and a larger scope takes possession of him; unrest urges him to action, and he uses all his spare time and means to the development of his latent powers and resources. Very soon so altered has his mind become that the workshop can no longer hold him. It has become so out of harmony with his mindset that it falls out of his life as a garment is cast aside. And with the growth of opportunities that fit the scope of his expanding powers, he passes out of it altogether. Years later we see this youth as a grown man. We find him a master of certain forces of the mind that he wields with worldwide influence and almost unequaled power. In his hands he holds the cords of gigantic responsibilities; he speaks and lives are changed; men and women hang upon his words and remold their characters. Sun-like, he becomes the fixed and luminous center around which innumerable destinies resolve.


INFP:
I read through some of that book a couple months ago. Good stuff.
I remember stealing a quote from it to put on my blog:

"Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace."

NANCY:
Are you busy forging weapons or making tool?

INFP:
Forging weapons and/or tools in the armory of thought? I'm probably busy doing both.

When it comes to mental weapons of self destruction I have a fully loaded arsenal in my possession. But once I became conscious of how dangerous they all were I made it a priority to learn how to disarm them. Most of the tools I'm making nowadays are specifically engineered to disarm the arsenal. They're good sturdy tools though, so hopefully one day they'll also help me in building some heavenly mansions of joy, strength and peace.


Visit the INFP Good and Evil series.

2 comments:

pixiequix said...

The Velveteen Rabbit is such a quintessential INFP image. Here's one of my favorite passages from that book:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Queen of Wands said...

you will enjoy my article for parents of introverted children called "Loved Real" wherein i say much the same things,

http://www.theintrovertzcoach.com/loved_real.html