You might ask if it’s necessary to have this sort of control for your life. My answer is a definite “yes.” Do you know why people have medical histories? Simply to note down and be sure about when a crisis occurred, how it was overcome, when the next setback occurred, what they felt when it came along, how it was sorted out. Whenever there was a problem, my doctors would always look at the medical record. I’m sure I managed to avoid loads of X-rays, blood tests, and duplicate prescriptions. Memory is so selective.…
The good thing about writing these things down is that it shows you how life is cyclical: Everything comes back and keeps on coming back. The problem is that our memory is very small and very forgetful. You’ll be fascinated to see how your high points and low points repeat themselves, and your life history will have a solution for everything in your life.
I know what you’re thinking. Don’t be afraid; it won’t take up too much of your time. All you need to do is write for a few minutes each day and gather together objects and things that are comparable to X-rays or the results of blood tests. These are important: There’s no good record that doesn’t contain evidence (in this case bits of your life). They could be bits of napkin (from the restaurant where you managed to get something you wanted), rocks from some beach (where your life took one step forward and you felt complete), or even just the ticket from the parking garage at the shopping center where you parked the day you saw the film that changed your life.
Your life record will get bigger and bigger and eventually maybe you’ll need to buy a second and a third file.
If you’re lucky, one day you’ll die (yes, if you’re lucky) and your children, your friends, your yellows (who are your yellows, you wonder? We will get to that in due time) will inherit this life history and will know what it was that made you happy, what made you feel complete. Is there anything more valuable than that they should know you better? I don’t think so. This is the true reward: to open up the private boxes of the people we love and know more about them. I have so many friends with information hidden away within them, and whenever I find out something more about them I feel happier, more complete.
Here’s the list for your life record:
1. Buy a file that’s large, almost like a box. You get to choose the color, but I recommend gray.
2. Every day write down three or four things that have made you feel happy. Only this: Don’t force yourself too much. Write: “I felt happy today.”
3. Next, write down when, where, and why. Does everything have to be connected to happiness? No, of course not. You can talk about nostalgia, smiles, irony. But everything has to be positive. In a medical record you don’t write about anything apart from mishaps, problems, and recuperation; in a life record you should talk about life, positive, happy life. Carry out this exercise: Think about good things that have happened to you, with whom and where. Little by little you’ll discover patterns. People who make you happy, places and times of day that make you feel more alive.
4. Include physical material. Whenever you can, incorporate an object that’s got some relationship to the particular moment. Objects become impregnated with happiness and should be in your life record. Anything will do; all it has to do is belong to the place. But don’t put in thousands and thousands of objects; you have to be selective or else your life record will end up eating your house.
5. Reread it; touch it when you feel bad and sad and also when you feel happy. At least once every six months give it a once-over; examine your life record. You’ll discover things, patterns that show you how you are. Every extra 1 percent of yourself that you discover is a step further toward another state of mind.
6. Gift it: Leave it to someone when you die. Remember, it’s not just for you, but also for other people, the people who love you.
I think that the day someone inherits my medical history and my life history will be a marvelous one. The person who gets them will be happy with both records. One will tell him how many leucocytes I had in October 1988, what my left leg looked like in X-rays (there’s not a lot of people who know that), and, above all, will give him that final horizontal line. How beautiful a single line can be! The other record will show him why I laughed, what I got excited about, why I died. I think I’ll give them to two different people. It’s always good for knowledge to be shared.
7
There are seven tricks to being happy
Hey, kid, you’re not sleeping, right? Listen, this is the first one. The most important thing in life is to know how to say no. Write it down so you won’t forget.
—my first roommate, Mr. Fermín (age seventy-six), at 5:12 in the morning
This is a piece of advice that an old man with whom I shared my first hospital room gave me. It was a six-man room; later they moved me into a two-man one. He gave me this advice very early one morning: Early mornings bring people together so much that you get the courage to confess desires and inadmissible dreams. Then the day comes and with it … with it … sometimes there comes regret.
Mr. Fermín was an impressive man: He’d had thirty different jobs, was seventy-six years old, and had a life full of incredible stories. For a kid of fourteen who was coming into the hospital for the first time, this was the mirror I wanted to reflect myself in, the future I wanted and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to attain. I thought this man was really great. He was pure energy.
He always ate oranges; he loved oranges. He smelled citrusy. Over the seven nights he shared a room with me he gave me advice about how to have a good life; he gave me what he called the seven rules for being happy.
Every rule came with an explanation that lasted an hour, with lots of graphic examples. The people who studied in these life-lesson classes were a fellow Egghead from the Canary Islands with one arm and me (who would later end up with one leg). His dissertations were very enjoyable, great fun. He made us take note of everything. I think that a lot of times he thought we didn’t understand anything at all. And he was right. I understood almost nothing, but those notes in my adolescent handwriting have lasted me the rest of my life.
He made us promise that we would never tell these seven rules to anyone unless we felt ourselves to be close to death. Both of us promised, although we argued with him about this. (We were adolescents: At that age you argue about everything.) We thought it would be difficult to keep those secrets. There was a difficult period of give-and-take, but eventually we got him to tell us one of the rules. And this is the one I’ll tell you.
What I’m going to tell you is the first piece of advice he gave. I heard it the first morning I ever spent in the hospital. It’s a memory that smells of oranges. I like it when memories have a smell.
He asked us to sit up, looked at both of us, and said: “Write this down. In this life you’ve got to know how to say no.”
The guy from the Canary Islands and I looked at each other: We didn’t understand a thing. How to say no? And anyway, why did we have to say no, when it’s so great to say yes?
Next, just as he would do on the next six nights, he gave us a long explanation about why you have to say no. I wrote down the following:
• No to what you don’t want.
• No to what you don’t yet know that you don’t want but at the moment you do want.
• No to obligations.
• No if you know you won’t be able to fulfill what you’re being asked to do.
• And most important: Say no to yourself!!!
I think that saying no to yourself must have been the most important one because he made us put down lots of exclamation marks after it. Next to the last exclamation mark there’s even a stain made by a segment of orange (or that’s what I think when I look at it). Sometimes what one wants is so intense that it becomes a reality.
The day after giving us the seventh piece of advice, he died. It was one of those deaths that mark you: He gave us seven rules to be happy and then he died. The guy from the Canary Islands and I were both aware of what he had left us.
We decided to make a pact: We’d never lose the notes he’d made us take, and when we understood them we’d put them to use.
I forgot about these pieces of advice about being happy for years. This posthumous list contained, although I didn’t yet know it, all that you need to know to be happy. I started to understand them little by little and eventually internalized them.
I can assure you that I’ve said no to lots of things in my life: no to things in the hospital, no to things out of the hospital. I’ve never felt that a no should be a yes. But it’s clear that when you say no and you are sure about it, success is almost assured.
Sometimes I want to feel that I’m about to die so that I can tell people the other six rules. My friend from the Canary Islands was lucky like this: He died six years later and with a smile told me that he had passed the rules on to three other people. He was a great guy, who didn’t speak all that much: He thought that words were overrated.
The list of nos:
1. You have to know how to say no.
2. Nos have to have to do with things that you want, that you don’t want, that you know aren’t anything to do with you, and that are also relevant to you.
3. Nos have to be accepted. Don’t doubt yourself; if you say no, trust the no that you say.
4. Enjoy the nos as much as the yeses. Nos don’t have to be negative; they can make you happy, they can build the same bridges as the yeses. Don’t think that you are denying anything, but rather that you are opening up the way to other yeses.
The last thing I wrote down in the notebook was “Don’t fool yourself: a no will bring you lots of yeses.” When I was fourteen I didn’t understand anything, but now that I’m thirty-four I think I’ve got a meaning worked out. I want to make it as far as sixty to see what new meanings appear out of what he told me. Every year, the list of seven rules gathers more meanings, shows a different face to the world. This is the good thing about age: It changes everything. I think this is the greatest thing about getting older, about becoming an adult.
Every year I go back over those notes, getting more and more juice out of the seven rules to happiness. Enjoy the first one. One out of seven isn’t bad.
8
What you hide the most reveals the most about you
Tell me a secret and I’ll tell you why you’re so special.
—Néstor,
the coolest orderly I ever met
We’re all special. I know it sounds like a cliché, but we are. We never liked hearing the words disabled or invalid in the hospital. They’re two words to get rid of; lack of physical function doesn’t have anything to do with them.
Over the years I have worked with mentally handicapped people, and here’s another phrase to get rid of. These are people who tend to be the most special of all and the ones I respect the most; they’re sensitive, innocent, and simple. And I use these words in their most positive sense. They’re special.
I’m missing a leg and a lung, although I’ve always thought that in fact I had an artificial leg and a single lung. Missing, possessing—it all depends on how you look at it. In my own way I am special. I like to think that I’m marked out in some way and that this makes me different.
But it’s not just the lack of physical or mental elements that makes someone special. Like I said earlier, we’re all special. All you have to do is validate what it is that makes you special.
There was an orderly in the hospital who said: “Tell me a secret and I’ll tell you why you’re so special.” While we were in the recovery rooms he told us about special people and the secrets that we all have. He thought that secrets are necessary in life, that they are private treasures only available to each of us individually. Because no one knows them, there’s no key to get to them, and they mark us internally because we never share them.
Above all he told us of the importance of sharing our secrets. He said it was like showing other people what makes us special, what makes us different, and that’s always the most difficult thing to talk about.
While he explained these things to us I looked at him closely. I wanted to know what this dark-skinned man was thinking, with his round eyes and prominent eyebrows. I wanted to know why he was special, what the secrets were that made him different.
I never knew what they were, but he taught us something vital: The things that we had—false legs, scars, bruises, bald heads—these were things that made us different and made us feel special, which is why we should never hide them but show them with pride.
He achieved his aim: I’ve never been ashamed to show off the things I lack. And I’ve been able to make secrets, the things that are the most difficult for us to share, nothing more than a proof of our differences.
When I left the hospital I didn’t forget these lessons. Whenever I’ve had a secret I’ve asked myself if having it is a good idea and I’ve decided when to reveal it, when to allow it to transform me into someone special. What you hide is what says the most about you.
The formula is …
1. Think about your most hidden secrets.
2. Allow them to mature and finally reveal them. Enjoy keeping them hidden, but enjoy it more when you show them.
3. When you do reveal them, secrets will make you special. Whatever they were, they used to be yours and now they belong to lots of people.
9
Put your lips together and blow
It’s not just for your birthday. Blow and make a wish, blow and make a wish.
—the mother of my friend Antonio, one of the Eggheads, who left us at the age of thirteen
It’s possible that while I was in the hospital they gave me a thousand injections, no kidding. I’ve got cysts, dry veins, hidden veins. I love it when a vein decides to sink down into the body’s catacombs, far away from the skin, far away from the needles. How intelligent veins are.
I always breathed out when they gave me an injection, as much when I stopped feeling pain as when I felt it. Breathing out, like blowing out a candle, always makes things better. I like to think there’s something magical in it.
I remember that Antonio’s mother—Antonio was a funny little Egghead who always made me laugh—told us that we should blow out air and make a wish. She told us that people only do this when it’s their birthday because they think that there’s something powerful about the day itself, but they don’t know that it’s the blowing out that’s the most important thing. I loved Antonio’s mother; she always told us great stories full of examples. Among many other things, she told us about the power of blowing on things.
She told us about mothers who blew on their children’s injuries when they fell off their bicycles, about grazes that were cured with nothing more than blowing and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide. Blowing on things as a superpower.
I believed this without question. Every time they gave me an injection I made a wish; I never forgot to do this. I blew out, made a wish, and noticed the injection. I smiled automatically. What luck it was to be able to make so many wishes. I felt privileged. Also, I should add, lots of them have been fulfilled.
And now in my normal life I haven’t stopped blowing. I blow and make a wish two or three times a week, without any obvious cause, whenever I need to. As Antonio’s mother said, all these wishes, all this blowing accumulates inside us and we have to let it out, we have to extract these desires.
So don’t be frightened, and blow at least once a week, whenever you need to make a wish.
Sometimes I think that so many of my wishes have come true because of blowing so much in the hospital.
I think that, without knowing, the body has given us a weapon against bad luck; the problem is that the day-to-day nature of this superpower stops us from noticing it.
Remember:
1. Form your lips into an O.
2. Think of a wish and believe that perhaps it will come true. The wish has to be something that you really want; it can’t be just anything.
3. And blow. Breathe out air, your own air.
And remember, the bigger the wish, the bigger the amount of air you blow out. The ideal is for you to breathe out until there’s nothing left inside. End up without any more air to blow out.
I’m sure that the people who live to be a hundred have blown out like this a lot. This exchange of air, breathing in and out, is what has given them such long lives.
Antonio died blowing out. I don’t know what he was wishing for, but his mother told me that she was sure his wish had been granted. I believe so, too. Put your lips together and blow. Make another wish.…
10
Don’t be afraid of being the person you have become
Albert, trust the person you used to be. Respect your past self.
—one of the cleverest doctors I had (this was what he told me while he was explaining what the surgery would be like)
My doctor always told me that he wanted the best for me, but sometimes what seemed the best ended up not being the best. It’s difficult to know how a human body will react to a drug, or a therapy or an operation. But he asked me to trust him, and he emphasized this: “I’ve always believed,” he said, “that if my ‘past me’ took this decision, it was because he believed in it. [Your ‘past you’ is you a few years, months, or days ago.] Respect your past you.”
This was a great piece of advice. Maybe at that exact moment I didn’t think of it in that way. I was about to have an operation and I really hoped that his “present him” wasn’t going to make a mistake.
After I left the hospital I reflected on these words. It was a great discovery, not just for medical purposes but for everything. We tend to think that we make the wrong decisions; it’s as if we think that we’re cleverer now than we used to be, as if our past selves hadn’t balanced all the pros and cons of the decisions we made.