Read The Yellow World for Free Online Page B

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 aredenying 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 ownway 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