The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa Page A

that people don’t know whether they love the person they’rewith. 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. Andhe’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