Snapshots of Self-Differentiation
Pepe peered outside through the curtains onto the streets of Luarca, a fishing town in Spain. He was four years old. The year was 1918.
In 2018, Pepe (Jose Ameal) was believed to be the oldest survivor of what later became known as the Spanish Flu, though it did not originate in Spain. He remembers his family protecting him, and he holds fond memories of a local doctor who visited the sick without charge during that frightening time.
He remembers this doctor well because he contracted the illness and survived.
The 1918 flu would not be his last brush with adversity and misfortune. In 1939, at the end of Spain’s three-year civil war, he was herded into a concentration camp outside Madrid by soldiers from General Francisco Franco’s victorious Nationalists. He managed to escape by bribing a Moroccan soldier with a watch. He proceeded to walk 20 miles to his Madrid home where his first wife, Isabel, was waiting for him.
After the war, Jose Ameal lived in Madrid for another two decades, working as a taxi driver and chauffeur for bullfighters before moving back to Luarca. His has been a life scored by these signature moments of surviving adversity, but mainly his has been a normal life full of friends, family, and laughter.
This centenarian reminds us that all of us experience significant challenges and tragedies, but ultimately, we keep going and find new life around the next corner.
What stories of resilience and survival exist in your family tree? How can you look back on your own life to remember your inherent capacity for resilience through misfortune?
*Much of this story has been excerpted from a BBC story by James Badcock on May 21, 2018.
Worth Repeating
We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.
-Carol Dweck
