Tag Archives: INFP

I am a Dreamer

“I am a dreamer and having a dream is sometimes challenging,
but I never look at a situation as too difficult.”
— Sister Rosemary

“She is an extremely affable and compassionate personality who will go out of her way to help no matter what. She radiates with energy and iron determination.”

uganda

Northern Uganda had suffered from civil unrest since the early 1980s. Hundreds of people were killed in the rebellion against the Ugandan government, and an estimated 400-thousand people were left homeless. Uganda’s military battled the two main rebel groups, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).  Thousands of children fell victim to the war, abducted by both the LRA and the ADF to serve as fighters, porters, and in the case of girls, fighters and sex slaves.

“We can still walk in hope.” -Sister Rosemary

Observing her as a child, her family always knew she would be a leader of children when she became a adult.

We do what we do, what we do best. [For good or evil] Continue reading I am a Dreamer

The Danger of a Single Story

“Everybody has a story. And there’s something to be learned from every experience.”
— Oprah Winfrey

She would know how hard it is.

She wouldn’t assume the worse or just abandon things.

She warned us of this:  The Danger of a Single Story

Journalism’s weakness:  Hit and run investigative journalism.  Headlines and Magazine Covers.  Money and reflective fame.

Shallow and a single story.  Sometimes good, most of the time irrelevant, sometimes bad…

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Just the Way You Are

“I like you — Just the way you are.”

fred rogers and little boy

Yes Fred, you have got it.  It’s called Temperament.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right — for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences. — David Keirsey [Different Drummers, Please Understand Me II]

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
Nelson Mandela

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Fred Rogers would say it in some way, “I like you just the way your are” every day of the week on his children’s TV show.

“He was basically a very shy man. He wasn’t the sort of fellow who got up and made bold statements about what we should be doing for children’s television. He did it in his own way and did it very effectively.”
—Bob “Captain Kangaroo” Keeshan

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood began airing in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes; the last set of new episodes was taped in December 2000 and began airing in August 2001. At its peak, in 1985, 8% of U.S households tuned into the show.

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Continue reading Just the Way You Are

A Nobel Element

She was not impressed.

After all, this Nobel Element is NOT a real Noble Element.  Even though this medal is of that metal.

Gold is a Noble Element

nobel_literature_medal

Oh Christ!… I couldn’t care less.”

It was the first reaction to when a reporter told her that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”

Small things amuse small minds.
–Doris Lessing

Continue reading A Nobel Element

I, too, was once a Human Being, Revisited

No ashes, no coal can burn with such glow.
As a secretive love of which no one must know.

She was.

But, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” [Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities]

She began her dark journey into light at the age of seventeen.

In that darkness, he had beaten her ‘on her bare buttocks’ in a ‘special room’ away from the family. In the light, she eventually confessed that she had felt sexual excitement when her father beat her. Her mother had raised her ‘in complete sexual ignorance.’

Suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.

Continue reading I, too, was once a Human Being, Revisited

I Am I Said..

He once said that nowhere felt like home and that he didn’t have many friends. It’s been a lifelong struggle to fit in.”

He grew up in Forties working-class Brooklyn, the son of Polish-Russian Jews. He says of that, “a childhood shapes you and you’re like soft clay when you’re a child, in every respectIf  fans are familiar with my music they are familiar with me,  because the music is a direct reflection of who I am as a person.” 

             ” I got an emptiness deep inside

            And I’ve tried but it won’t let me go..”

He would ride the subway every day to college where he was studying to become a doctor. Having received a guitar for his 15th birthday from his parents, he wrote songs on the train ride.

“The subway was the only time I had privacy and quiet.”

His family were forever moving house in search of better business opportunities, which resulted in him having attended nine different schools at age sixteen.  This lifestyle was forced on him by circumstances and it was instrumental in forming his internal, fiercely self-reliant personality. He says it was there, in his childhood that he developed a pathological resistance to any kind of uniformity.  Along with that and his singing talent he became somewhat of an enigma to those close to him and he was, without exception, excluded from every circle of friends he encountered. He  became a loner, “I don’t fit in” and a necessary condition for his survival. This forced him to create an imaginary friend, as he tells us in ‘Shilo’:

Papa says he’d love to be with you
If he had the time
So you turn to the only friend you can find
There in your mind
Shilo, when I was young
I used to call your name
When no one else
Would come
Shilo, you always came
And we’d play….
Even in adulthood, he has retained the ability to withdraw into a protective world of his own, and at the end of 1976, he said: “I still live in a fantasy world sometimes, because it’s safe.  It’s a cushion,  a protective thing you build, and nothing can hurt me, at least in my own mind.”
He also developed an interest in writing lyrics and realised that music facilitates social interaction and that it helped him to overcome his innate shyness. He would later write ‘Longfellow serenade’ a song of which he was especially fond of, because it took him back to those school days when he was too shy to ask a girl on a date, so he would write her a poem. He would tell us:
“I imagined the poet who writes the words he cannot speak to the woman he wants to woo and win.”
Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame  2011, his songs have been covered internationally by many performers from various musical genres. With the exception of the period between 1972 and 1976  when he temporarily bade the stage farewell so as to ‘find himself’ (and spend more time with his family), he has, since the late 1960s, drawn millions of people from all over the world to his concerts. In a 2008 performance in Glastonbury, England alone, the audience totalled more than 170,000 people.

“I have to know myself and I have spent my life trying to know myself.”

He is an American singer-songwriter with a career that has spanned five decades, he has sold over 125 million records worldwide including 48 million in the United States alone. Considered the third most successful adult  contemporary artist ever on the Billboard chart behind Barbra Streisand and Elton John.

Continue reading I Am I Said..

Queen of People’s Hearts

I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.  But someone’s got to go out there, love people and show it.

                                I am a free spirit – unfortunately for some.”

dianax1

“This is me, this is me!” exclaimed Princess Diana when she was read Dr. David Keirsey‘s portrait of an Healer Idealist, (INFP).

Continue reading Queen of People’s Hearts

Within the Edge of …

October 27, 1992

His voice was bubbly and full of enthusiasm: “You know it’s tantalizing.  — I feel I’m on the edge of something.”

That was last thing he said to his wife.

“In considering the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we are led to observe that the whole field of the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no independent existence. It has the appearance of  independent existence, but that appearance is merely the result of an abstraction of our thought.  We can see this dependent nature of the finite from the fact that every finite thing is transient…”

He had developed his own interpretation — a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory, the predictions of which agree perfectly with the nondeterministic quantum theory. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell‘s inequality, the consequences of which are still being investigated. [Wikipedia, revised]

Continue reading Within the Edge of …

Thousands

“I am sorry, I am trying to take the youngest first, I want to save a nation.”

He failed to save a nation.  But he did save thousands, ten thousands, maybe even up to one hundred thousand.

“He was the most tireless, persistent, stubborn person — he was single minded in his determination for his mission.”

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