We didn’t have wheels, we couldn’t go to the disco, but we had wheelchairs and so many places to visit and play. Every day one of us would choose a place to go, where to spend the night. My favorite was going to see the “other” Eggheads: the newborn babies. We’d go, we’d whisper sweet nothings to them, we’d make them laugh, and they’d look at us and make their noises. It was a strange feeling: They had their whole lives ahead of them; ours were within touching distance of their end.
I’ve always believed in the power of the night; I’m sure that the night makes your wishes come true. There were so many nights in the hospital when I felt capable of overcoming my fears and changing the rhythm of my life, although this effort has only one obstacle in its way: You have to get past your dreams, avoid the cold light of day. This is where successful people live, people who turn their dreams into reality: They can overcome the dawn. This is what Christian always used to say. He was someone’s brother but I can’t remember whose. Sometimes the visitor is more important than the person visited.
I’ve always tried to have my best ideas born during the night: at three or four in the morning. This time of night is the right time to draw up plans. It’s as if when you are almost ready to fall asleep your whole self is in agreement with what you are thinking, and this encourages you and gives you energy.
Being tired makes us sweeter. So many good ideas don’t seem so good the next morning; so often the things we decide in the night fail to take place. I think that tiredness makes us less animal and more human, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
While I was in the hospital I made all my important decisions in these watches of the night, before falling asleep. I loved waking up at that time, when the whole hospital would be asleep, including the nurses; it was as if the whole place belonged to me. I planned my life, worked on my dreams, and aspired to do everything.
When I left the hospital I went back to doing this. I trusted a great deal in the middle of the night. Also, I’m sure that when someone invents a drug that stops you from needing to sleep, the middle of the night will be the time for a new meal: the REM.
The REM will be even more important than lunch or tea. You’ll have REMs with people who are special, people who, like you, believe in this time of the day. When the moment comes I hope I’ll be ready.
21
The power of the first time
“Moments” are our greatest treasure. They are what we are.
—a teacher who gave us lessons and spoke more about moments than math, because he thought that we’d forget about the math but the moments remain
He always started by saying, “There’s nothing like a good moment. A moment is a piece of life we’ve all lived through.”
I’m a big fan of moments, I’d say even more of a fan than that teacher (sometimes the pupil can be better than the master), because there was a time when I lost them. Moments occur most in childhood and adolescence. But everybody’s life is full of moments.
There was a time while I was in the hospital when I stopped having moments; well, maybe that’s not entirely true, but I exchanged them for other types of moment. Hospital moments, which I share with other people who’ve lived in hospitals.
“Moments” can be defined as things that one day you do for the first time and which mark you, because they stay with you.
For example, here’s a triple moment connected to transport:
1. There’s the first day that you and a friend left school together. The first time that you went out of school at the same time, talking about stuff. We’ve all experienced this moment: walking along with someone and then separating at some given point. It’s a way of feeling adult. It’s magic, a moment from when you were seven or eight years old.
2. Years later, approaching sixteen, you have another moment connected with going home. You don’t walk home; you want to catch your first taxi. You go with a friend, you look for a taxi, you don’t find one, you curse the ones that don’t stop. It’s another moment of maturity, of feeling yourself growing older.
3. And finally a day when you’re about nineteen and you’ve got a car and you take a friend (maybe the same friend from the two previous moments) back to his house. And you sit with this friend talking in the car until the small hours. Another moment.
I think that there’s nothing in life that I like more than looking for moments. After discovering them, after that teacher showed us what they were, I started to collect them. In the hospital, the moments I already had helped me to keep going. They happen at such a young age that they form the essence of your life. Every year I remember two or three moments and I feel good; I feel happy at this reencounter.
People sometimes forget that we are the fruit of what we live through in our childhood and our adolescence; we are the product of many moments. And sometimes we close the door to them when we should have it always open.
For a few years my moments were slightly strange: the first time my leg was amputated, the first time I lost a lung. But they were moments nonetheless.
And even when you are an adult, you live through a lot of moments, but what happens is that you stop noticing. I think that to truly know yourself you need to go back to your moments, analyze them, and accept them for what they are.
My life is made up of moments and odors, and they are what make me what I am.
22
A way never to get angry
Look for your point of no return.
—a radiologist with small ears and huge eyebrows who hypnotized us with his tone of voice and his stories
I think that there’s nothing I hate more than getting angry: shouting, cursing, not being able to control myself.
Sometimes in the hospital we cursed our fate; sometimes we got angry about it. A doctor (a radiologist who sometimes told us jokes when he was on duty) taught us how to control our moments of anger, to be capable of knowing our limits.
He spoke to us about the “point of no return.” Once you’ve passed this point, you can’t avoid getting angry. It exists, it’s tangible, it’s physical; we can feel it and therefore we can control it.
Our radiologist friend made us take a piece of paper and write down what it was we noticed before reaching this point, the levels of annoyance. What are they like? What do you notice when you feel that you can’t control your fury?
It was a list of three or four points a bit like this:
1. I notice that I’m annoyed by what the other person is saying.
2. I start to notice that my anger is getting stronger.
3. I’ve started to raise my voice; I notice that my anger is getting control of me. I start to lose control.
4. I reach the point of no return.
If there are three stages before you get to this point, then you will see, just before you reach it, just before you lose control and get angry, that the possibility of stopping exists. Maybe you’ll notice that just before the point of no return you move your hands a lot, or your voice shakes or you swear a lot. These are the effects you have to control.
How? First of all by asking your partner, or your friend or one of your yellows, to use a key word when they see one of these symptoms. They should say “pistachio” or “United States.” Whatever it takes to make you realize that you are approaching the point. To begin with you don’t notice your points of no return; they go by so quickly that the line between one state and the next is almost invisible.
When they’ve said the key word a few times you’ll find that you start to become capable of hearing it. This is when you have to turn off your anger, take a step back, because if you don’t reach that point then you’ll be able to control yourself. Everything can be sorted out if you don’t get to that point.
In the hospital I started to practice this; my key word was tumor. I’ve always liked giving a more positive spin to this word. Little by little I stopped getting annoyed. It worked, and I was overjoyed.
As you get older your point of no return
changes position. As the years go by and we get more experienced we get angry less often and our point of no return is further away. So it is important to look for it: Every year you need to search for it, find it, and not go past it.
It’s good to get angry every now and then, but it’s not good to reach the point of no return.
23
The best way to know if you love someone
Shut your eyes.
—Ignacio, a special one among the special ones
This has to be one of the pieces of advice that fascinate me the most. On the third floor of the hospital there were special people, people unfairly known as the mentally handicapped. (I strongly believe that this phrase should be struck from the dictionary.)
I think that they’re special people because they make you feel truly special. They are extremely innocent people who make everything simple and easy.
Perhaps what I found most exciting about them was seeing how they solved their problems, especially how they found out whether they loved someone. I’ve always thought that the great problems in our society come from the fact that people don’t know whether they love the person they’re with. This gives us a lot of headaches, lots of worries. Do I love the person I’m with or don’t I? Are they the right person? Is there another person whom I like more? What should I do?
What you should do with such problems is what the special people do, what they taught me to do. It’s nothing spectacular; it’s not a great trick or something so surprising that it leaves your mouth hanging open.
Lots of times when we had problems we went to see the special people. There would always be a huge number of details that had nothing to do with the decision we had to make, and they knew how to detect these. They knew how to filter the details that were necessary for making the correct decision.
They always advised us to shut our eyes. For them, shutting the eyes was almost magical. You shut your eyes and it is as if you’ve managed to get rid of all the unimportant details. Closing your eyes eliminates one of your senses, the sense that distracts you most, that brings in the most information.
We shut our eyes a lot in the hospital. Now I do it more than ever: how much I’ve discovered, how many decisions I’ve made with my eyes shut! And the most incredible thing is that you see everything so clearly.
Twenty-three Discoveries That Connect Two Ages: From Fourteen to Twenty-four
These are the twenty-three discoveries and I hope that as you read each one you’ll make more discoveries.
I hope that they give you the basis for this yellow world, the foundation for a different world.
I used them while I was getting cured, I set them running and they helped link two ages. You can use them to link two ages, too, or two moments or two sensations, or else just to live a single instant, the actual moment.
I remember that when I discovered them or started to put them into practice I was twenty-four. Just as I said at the beginning of the book, I was completely cured and couldn’t believe it. A couple of days had gone by and I was completely disoriented: I knew who I was but not who I had been.
So I decided to bury myself in my childhood, in that fourteen-year-old pre-cancer kid, and to start to link the two ages: fourteen and twenty-four.
It was something magical, incredible. I returned to those memories, found what I had liked or desired, and it was as if I were transplanting them into a man of twenty-four. I spent a wonderful year building bridges, having a conversation between the two people who lived in this body. It was without doubt the most incredible year of my life: I listened to myself, understood myself, developed respect for myself. During this year I learned the lessons of cancer and applied them to my life. One of the two guys, the one who was twenty-four, had the weapons to fight cancer, and the fourteen-year-old had the innocence to keep on living as if he had never known cancer. What could be better than using both strengths together, both energies?
Of course, without cancer, the fourteen-year-old would have become someone different, and the twenty-four-year-old, who knew this, only wanted that younger kid to feel accepted, loved.
I liked it when they agreed on something, when they saw that there weren’t so many things that separated them in reality. In fact, maybe they wanted the same thing but expressed it in different ways.
I also liked it when they argued; that was when I grew up, when I realized that I didn’t now have the same objectives. And this was good, because somehow two people shared two interests, two aims. Debate is necessary to survive.
At the end of that year I made a pact with the fourteen-year-old: He would always have a vote, I would always listen to his opinion. Because that fourteen-year-old couldn’t be what he’d wanted to be, I’d let him be with me always. And he’s never abandoned me; I get older and bigger, but the fourteen-year-old kid is still inside me, advising me and giving me his opinion.
Without knowing it, many people forget their fourteen-year-old kid, but I think that the important thing is to go back, dive in, and build bridges back to that moment. It’s like swimming along the bottom of a swimming pool, going through a little tunnel and ending up in a littler swimming pool; that’s where the fourteen-year-olds are. Speak to them, exchange things with them, and rescue what you can for the larger pool.
The fourteen-year-old kids make us complicated, various. It’s a difficult period, one in which we make our most important decisions, the decisions that mark our characters. The problem is that sometimes we forget; sometimes we think that we were mistaken and try to build ourselves from the beginning again.
I think it’s good to build yourself up on the basis of what you already are: go back to the foundations, go back to the fourteen-year-old. The basis of what you are is certainly there. The basis of what you want to be. Now that I think about it, this could be another discovery, number twenty-four. But I’ll leave it here.
Just trust in the twenty-three discoveries. Trust in them and they’ll come true. And now let’s go to the yellows.… The time has come!
Do you think it’s right that an engineer should write poetry?
Culture is an ornament; business is business.
If you stay with that girl you’re not welcome in our house.
That’s living.
—Gabriel Celaya
The Yellows
We’ve reached one of the chapters that I think is the most important and that makes me the most excited to write. I’m very keen on talking about the yellows.
You have to know that it’s 1:41 A.M. on an August night (when I revise the chapter it’s 11:08 on an October morning). I’ve always believed that positioning the moment of writing, the day (it’s early Thursday morning), gives everything a far greater reality. (The revision takes place midmorning on a Tuesday.) It’s a dimension that you don’t normally get when you read a book. When did he write this? Where was he? What was the weather like?
A few months ago I was lucky enough to interview Bruce Broughton, the composer of famous soundtracks for movies like Young Sherlock Holmes and Silverado. We spoke about the possible variables that can influence the creative process: your partner? The place? The temperature? He thought that above all creativity has to do with the way you receive what you see and how you transform it. Your own speed of transformation. It was really a great luxury to listen to someone who was so overflowing with creativity, although he acknowledged that his own speed of creation changed depending on whether he was alone or not, how hot it was, and how much he could concentrate.
But let’s not get off the main topic: the yellows. As well as being a chapter of the book, they also give the book its original title. It’s the great treasure that I gained from cancer. You can always learn something that takes you three steps or three miles further than the rest; there will always be an Induráin, a Borg;* there’s always someone or something that stands out. And if you know, as I think you do, that I like lists, there has to be a well-ordered way of explaining why some things stand out.
This will be a long chapter, and because I don’t want to get lost I’ll try not to get sidetracked. Especially since if there’s one thing I want you to take from reading this book, it’s the idea of the yellows.
I hope that within a few months people will be looking for yellows, will use this term to describe them, will adopt it fully. There are words and phrases that appear and become popular, sometimes because of bad things (tsunami), sometimes because of good things (Internet), sometimes just because of the way fashions change (metrosexual). It’s not that I particularly want to invent a new term, but I think it’s necessary to have a word that defines this concept. Concepts need words to define them, like people need names. There was a man in the hospital who always said: “They give you a name as soon as you’re born; you can’t not have a name!” I always looked at him and smiled—I didn’t understand what he wanted to say. This happened to me a lot in the hospital; I was fifteen or sixteen and the other patients were pushing sixty or seventy. They spoke to me as if I were an adult, they gave me adult advice, they looked at me like an adult. And I wrote down everything I didn’t understand but that I felt I might understand years later.
I love it when the brain decides to take in a concept, a language, a feeling. I think that the brain’s on a time lock; you have to push lots of buttons and enter lots of different codes for it to open and accept what it at first rejected. All you need to do is find the password. The same way I hope to find what the yellows explain.
I met lots of yellows in the hospital, although I didn’t know what they were back then. I thought that they were friends, twin souls, people who helped me, guardian angels. I didn’t understand how a stranger who had played no part in your life until two minutes ago could suddenly become a part of you, understand you more than anyone else on this earth, and help you to feel completely identified with and understood. What I’ve just written could, plausibly, serve as an initial definition of a yellow.