The Yellow World Read Online Free Page B

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 somethingwith 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 whenI 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