Anyway, the important thing is not the envelope but what’s in the envelope. The problem is how to face an important piece of news, one that could change your life. We learned how to do it in the hospital; we learned by making mistakes, which is how you learn almost anything in this life.
To begin with, we would open the envelope frantically, right there in the hospital, two minutes after it was handed over. I remember a few images from the hospital corridor: my father, my mother, and me leaning over the sheet of paper, reading (maybe better to say devouring) what was written on it.
A little bit later we realized that it wasn’t a good idea to open it in the hospital: You shouldn’t give or get bad news in a place where you have spent or are going to spend a lot of time. You have to find somewhere neutral. So we would open the envelope in restaurants (ones that we were going to for the first time), in unknown streets (whose names we later forgot), or in the metro. But we were still making a mistake: We never let more than fifteen minutes pass from getting the envelope to opening it. Without realizing, we looked for nearby restaurants, streets, or metro stations. We had an urgent need to know what was in the envelope, as if something were burning us from the inside.
With time, after they had given us forty or fifty envelopes, we discovered the perfect method. There’s no doubt that you can become a professional even when it comes to reading medical diagnoses: All you need to do is repeat the action over and over again until it doesn’t seem like you’re repeating it.
The perfect method:
1. Take the envelope calmly, put it away, and take it home without thinking about it.…
2. Wait for exactly half an hour without thinking about the envelope, without giving it a single second of your time. And when exactly half an hour has passed …
3. Go to a calm place and open it. This half hour is all the time your body needs to calm down and all the time your mind needs to become serene; it’s as if all your anxiety disappears. The best thing about this is that when you react to the results, they’re half an hour older as well. It’s as if they were old news and this takes away their strength and gives you power.
I know this might seem strange. Why half an hour and not an hour? Why not ten minutes? Are these thirty minutes that important? Yes, they are. I think that through receiving so many pieces of important news, I’ve discovered that there’s something in us that wants to know the news immediately, and this something blinds us. It’s like a passion that vanishes after exactly thirty minutes and activates other energies in us, energies that also want to know what’s happened but that are capable of looking for solutions. These energies are a form of anxiety but a form with a different aim, anxiety that fights, that resolves problems.
When I stopped going to the hospital I thought that I would never be faced with dilemmas as powerful as the ones I had about the X-rays. And that’s how it was, but I’ve found a way of adapting my thirty-minute theory to real life.
I often receive an email that I know is important; I see it pop up in my inbox but I don’t open it. I look at it, still up there with its title in bold, but I don’t open it. I wait for thirty minutes. I relax, I let my anxiety change, and then I open it.
It’s great, and it works. And whether it’s good or bad news that you’re getting, you’ve let half an hour pass and your response isn’t hasty, the result of an immediate reaction. It’s as if you’ve spent half an hour deciding what to write. You can do the same with text messages, and lots of other things as well.
This is also useful for when you need to discuss something with someone, especially when it comes to choosing the time and the place you speak to them.
I always follow the thirty-minute rule and sometimes, I must admit, I stretch it as far as forty or even as many as forty-three minutes. It’s a way of stretching time, of being the lord and master of your anxieties and your responses.
4
Ask five good questions every day
Take an exercise book and write; write down everything you don’t understand.
—my doctor,
the day he told me I had cancer
This was the first piece of advice my doctor gave me when I got to the hospital. In fact, what he did was give me an exercise book and tell me to write down everything I didn’t understand.
Then he explained to me everything that would happen to me, cancerously speaking, over the next five years. It was amazing; he got it almost all right. Sometimes I dream about this moment and imagine what would have happened if, instead of talking to me about cancer, he had spoken about my life. He could have predicted my life for the next five or ten years. Who I would fall in love with, what I would end up studying. That would have been even more amazing.
But I don’t want to minimize the importance of what he said, because it turned out as he predicted. He spoke to me about biopsies, tumors, osteosarcomas, relapses. My parents listened to him and I took notes; I kept on taking notes. It was weird, but I even felt better as I was writing things down. It was as if, by getting my questions out into the open, by writing them down, I was stripping them of their mystery, their fear, their terror.
When he’d finished, he looked at me and said: “Any questions?” I replied that I had forty-two of them. That was all I’d had time to write down. That day he answered my forty-two questions, but I came up with twenty more. The more he explained, the more questions I had, but the more of those he answered the more peaceful I felt. It was a circle, good for both him and me.
I’ve never doubted the fact that possessing information is fundamental for everything in life. You can’t fight against cancer if you don’t know what you’re up against. First know who your enemy is, then find out everything about him and only then fight against him.
I think that the best thing about the time I had cancer was that they always gave me answers. Answers cure you; answers help you. Asking questions makes you feel alive. When they give you answers it means that they trust you’ll know what to do with the information.
But you don’t just have questions when you feel ill. Life itself generates a huge number of questions. When I left the hospital I started to ask myself questions. I’d left school at the age of fifteen and didn’t get back to my education until I went to college. I had hundreds of questions. This was when I decided to buy myself a yellow notebook (I didn’t know why I chose that color, but I realize now). I started to write down questions and to decide who to ask about them.
It was easy in the hospital:
1. Difficult questions to the doctor.
2. Halfway difficult ones to the nurse.
3. Easy ones (or the most complicated ones) to the orderlies and my roommates.
But in life itself not everything is so clear. So I would write down the question, the problem I wanted to solve, and the person I should ask about it. I really recommend you do this; you’ll start off by thinking that it’s ridiculous to write down silly questions and the people who you think might have the answers. But as you start to get answers you’ll realize that the method is very effective, and you’ll become an addict of your little notebook.
I’ve used this method in every aspect of my life: my love life, my family life, my friendships, my yellow life (in a bit, I’ll explain what the yellow life is). And it has always made me feel better.
So, it’s easy:
1. Choose a color for your notebook. The color has to have something to do with you. Each of us has a color that has nothing to do with the clothes we wear. Maybe you love your blue jeans but your color might be orange. It’s really easy to find your color. Look at a box of felt-tip pens and choose one to draw with; the one you choose will be your color.
2. Buy ten notebooks. Yes, I know. It might seem that one is enough, but actually each book is for a different aspect of the world. I’ve always thought that people have ten different worries about the world, ten possible paths through it. So use one book per path.
3. Write down all your queries. Stupid queries: How do
people manage to get their hair looking nice? Complicated queries: How can it be that people fall in love and I only think about sex? Eternal queries: Who am I? Who do I want to be? Do I really know nothing? Practical queries: How do you rent a light aircraft? How do you proceed with a divorce?
4. Look for the person who has the answers. Next to each question you should write down a possible candidate for the answer. Never leave this bit empty; put someone down, even if you don’t yet know them personally, even if it’s someone famous or invented or impossible.
5. Ask, absorb the answer, note down the queries that emerge, and ask again. The more queries you get answered the better you’ll feel.
In the hospital they told us that it is good to drink two liters of water a day. And my doctor always added: “And ask five good questions.” Don’t forget it, five questions a day and two liters of water.
5
Show me how you walk and I’ll show you how to laugh
It’s not easy to laugh. It’s not easy to breathe, either. There aren’t any schools for laughing and breathing. Am I boring you?
—the last words I heard from the nurse who took me to the operating room to get my leg cut off
We are born lacking things, lots of things, lots of very different things. With time we manage to cover this up in some way or another. Sometimes we do it well; sometimes we just do it as best we can. We even end up not knowing that we’re missing things. The brain is so clever that sometimes it hides very basic things about us from ourselves.
We don’t know how to walk, but we find out bit by bit how to walk. I’ve been lucky enough to have four kinds of walk:
1. My first steps, a year or so after I was born. It was a walk made up of quick steps and as I approached adolescence it was becoming a bit naughty. A walk that made me laugh a lot, in lots of different strange ways.
2. Years later, my second first steps, when they gave me my first mechanical leg. It was a slightly cruder walk, more like bouncing on a spring. A walk that changed the way I was, stopped me feeling comfortable, and stopped me laughing.
3. Then they switched me over to a hydraulic leg. This gave me a walk that was more cheerful, more singsong, more like something out of a musical. It made me feel better and I started to laugh in short, glissando-like bursts. This was when I realized that laughing and walking are connected. Show me how you walk and I’ll show you how you laugh. There’s something in the way we walk that affects our laughter, our sense of humor.
4. Now I’ve got an electronic leg, and walking and laughing seem absolutely connected. The weirdest thing is when I need to charge it up at night. Sometimes I don’t know whether to charge my computer, my cellphone, or my leg. I think it’s a luxury to have problems like this.
There is something fundamental about walking. People don’t really think about walking: “I walk like this, I’ve always walked like this.” They think it’s not going to change: If they’ve walked that way for thirty, forty years, why should they change now?
But what they don’t realize is that change is possible. Everything depends on finding the right way to breathe, finding the most suitable way for you to breathe. Devoting a bit of time to feeling the air coming in and out of you. Once you find your way of breathing, you need to think about how this breathing can move your legs. Breathing and movement are completely related.
Little by little you’ll find a way to walk. It’ll be different from the one you have at the moment. It’ll be a walk that’s brought into existence by the way that you breathe in and out. In lots of cases it will be a walk that’s so different that you won’t recognize yourself in a mirror, so different that you won’t think it’s you walking but someone else. Little by little, if you want, you can turn this new way of walking into a new way of running. But that’s something for the true initiates.
In the end you’ll notice that finding a different walk, a different way of bringing your feet into contact with the ground, will cause something to be born within you. A feeling a little like happiness. This is the seed of laughter. This feeling, this sentiment, is what will transform into laughter.
Little by little, without hurrying, extract and liquefy the laughter that has arisen from this way of walking. Try out the laugh that suits you best. Listen to it, first of all in your own home, in intimate surroundings. When you’ve decided on one, show it to your friends, laugh with them, without being scared, without being ashamed. Let yourself go.
This is your laugh. All you have to do is exploit it to its maximum potential and, almost without your knowing it, this laugh will change who you are and how you enjoy life.
We spend minutes deciding what we want to buy in a shop, hours choosing a car, months hunting for a house. But for something that is as intimate as a laugh, something that defines our character, our essence, our being, we are usually happy with the one that comes as a default.
Remember, the list goes like this:
1. Find a way to breathe. How? By breathing: by taking in and letting out air. Think about the way of breathing that defines you. Don’t think that you’ll find it in a day; give yourself a week at least. Enjoy yourself.
2. Practice breathing like this as you move around. Let this new way of oxygenating yourself get all the way down to your feet. Walk fast, walk slowly, walk on tiptoe: whatever it takes. You’ll end up finding your way of walking; you’ll notice it when you do.
3. Walk, and enjoy the feeling of walking. Do it for half an hour. This feeling of happiness can develop into laughter. What you feel is the material that laughter is made of. Laugh, smile, and fix upon a way of emitting the sound of your happiness.
4. Practice this at home. Practice it with friends. It’s a good idea to imitate the way your friends laugh. A merry-go-round of laughter is very positive.
5. Choose a laugh, and believe that this is something that defines you. Feel proud of your new acquisition and show it to people with pride. You’ve found a way of breathing, a way of walking, and a way of laughing. These are things that you should show off without any shame, just like a child does.
6. Renew your laugh every two years. Every two years I change my leg and I’m lucky enough that when I change the way I walk I change everything. Our lungs evolve, they get older, but it shouldn’t be these that control the way we breathe; we’ve got to take control and be the ones who decide how we want to oxygenate ourselves.
Breathe, walk, laugh, enjoy yourself. It’s that easy. This was the advice that the nurse gave me as he took me to surgery when they were going to cut off my leg. I was thinking about the leg I was going to lose and he spoke to me about breathing, about walking, about laughing. Remember that he ended up by asking if he was boring me. Actually, I wasn’t bored at all. Sometimes we are so focused on ourselves, on our own problems, that we forget that we are right at that moment on the edge of making the greatest discovery of our lives.
6
When you are sick, they keep tabs on your life, a medical record. When you are well, you should do the same: Keep a life record
The patient is cured.
—the last sentence and the last line that my oncologist wrote on my medical record
My medical record is endless; it grew fatter day by day, month by month, year by year. The last time I went to the hospital they brought it on a cart; it was so big that they couldn’t carry it.
I like the color of the file they used for the record, mostly because it’s the same shade as it was on the first day. There are few things in our lives that stay the same. It’s still a neutral gray color. I don’t think gray is ugly; it’s just got a bad reputation: gray days, gray suits … It’s a much underappreciated color, beaten only by black. But I think it’s the perfect color for a medical record because, as I see it, a record has to be distinguished, and gray is a very distinguished color.
There are letters from more than twenty doctors in my file:
1. From my oncologist (a strange job, but someone has to do it). They’re the bad guys fo
r anyone who’s got cancer. Any doctor who chooses this as his specialty deserves my complete admiration.
2. From my traumatologist, who’s the guy who has all the success. I’d have liked to have been a traumatologist; it seems to me the closest thing to being God.
3. From my physiotherapist …
4. From my radiologist …
5. From …
The list goes on. I remember when I was a kid I went to get soccer players’ autographs; this is the same but with doctors, and with the added difference that instead of a single illegible scrawl there are hundreds.
The last day that I saw my file was in the oncologist’s office. He wrote, “The patient is cured.” Underneath it, I remember perfectly, he drew a horizontal line. The line impressed me greatly. He closed the file, put it back on the cart, and the orderly took it away. That was the last time I saw it.
I thought I wouldn’t miss the file. But when I returned to normal life, I thought it would be a good idea to have one: not a medical history but a life history.
I bought a file (gray, of course) and thought about what to put into it. I was sure that I would write a diary: Diaries are living objects and extremely recommendable. How good it is to be able to read the things that worried you two or three years ago and to realize that now you couldn’t care less about them (sometimes because they’re goals that you’ve attained, sometimes because they’re things you didn’t really want anyway).
But diaries are only a part of a life history; they’re not enough in themselves. The pleasure of having a life history is to be able to include anything that happens in your life, every important moment, and when something stresses you out you can go to your record, open it, and calm yourself down.
The Yellow World Page 3