an INFP koala (III)

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"[We] rely on our feelings to guide us, and we use our discovers along the way to constantly search for value in life. Our search for truth and meaning underlying everything means that we’ll take every encounter and every piece of knowledge, sift them through our worldview, and evaluate how these new discoveries define or redefine our life-paths. Thus our worldviews are constantly changing, often in dramatic ways, but always in a way that goes back to how we feel about ourselves, others, the world, and God."

When it comes to constructing our worldviews, we let the construction project spill out from the foremen of our feelings. The events of our lives, interpreted through our acquired set of lens, will take on great meaning not by virtue of themselves but by virtue of having been sifted through the grid of our worldview. What this means “from the outside” is that a relatively simple, straightforward event can rise to the heights in our mind, encompassing about itself all sorts of meanings and values, and these events (which most people may very well nonchalantly forget) because cornerstones and turning-points in how we perceive our life story. The greatest events in my life thus far aren’t great by virtue of how they actually were but because I’ve attached so much meaning, interpretation, and feeling to them, and allowed them to guide my thinking and living.

Our worldviews are built up like an onion, layers of interpretation upon interpretation. When a deeper interpretation—upon which many other interpretations rest—becomes jeopardized by a change-of-heart on our end or something in our lives advocating a different interpretation, our worldviews will dramatically shift. Everything has to be reinterpreted, and these reinterpretations invariably lead to a change of praxis (how we live our lives). Thus it’s not uncommon to find an INFP in 2009 living a very distinct way, and then finding them again in 2012 living in a completely different way, because even in three years, we can undergo radical paradigm shifts in our thinking, and the way we perceive the world (our worldviews) always and without fail directly affect how we live our lives.