The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa Read Free Book Online Page B

is positive, extremely positive.
    So:
    1. Analyze any decisions you’ve made that you think were mistakes.
    2. Remember who made them. If it was you, remember the reasons you had. Don’t believe that you are cleverer than your past you.
    3. Respect your decisions and live with them.
    4. Eighty percent of you is the consequence of decisions you’ve made. Love yourself for what you are; love yourself for what you have become.
    5. Above all, acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes.The 20 percent of you made out of mistakes is something you have to acknowledge and accept.
    Like that doctor told me:
Acknowledgment
is the key word. You have to acknowledge yourself, acknowledge how you became what you are, and acknowledge whose fault it is.
    They taught us in the hospital to accept that we can make mistakes. My doctor sometimes made mistakes and always accepted the blame. The world would run more smoothly if we all accepted that we make mistakes, that we have made mistakes, that we’re not perfect. Lots of people try to find excuses for their mistakes, look for someone else to blame, shift liability for deaths onto other people; they never know the joy of accepting responsibility. There is joy in the knowledge that you have made a wrong decision and that you acknowledge it.
    I would love to see more trials where people admit their guilt, or drivers stopped for breaking the speed limit admit that they were going too fast.
    We have to acknowledge that we make mistakes in order to see where the mistakes are and not make them anymore. Maybe lots of people are afraid of the punishment that will follow from this admission, but the punishment is the least important bit; the only important thing is to give your brain the correct information.

11
Find what you like looking at, then look at it
    Wowwww!
    —exclamation produced by the little Egghead Marc, the youngest one (as a silver car parked millimeters away from him)
    There was a five-year-old kid who they brought into the hospital with cancer of the tibia. Sometimes he came with us to “the sun.” “The sun” was a place that they’d set up next to the parking lot; it always caught the sun and there was a basketball hoop.
    It wasn’t easy to get permission to go to the sun. You had to behave very well. They normally let us be in the sun between five and seven. I loved going out of the hospital to go to the sun. It made me feel great, like going on a trip to New York: The contrast was huge. We stayed out for those two hours taking the sun; we got tanned.
    Sometimes the little guy came with us. But he didn’t liedown to take the sun like the rest of us. He stayed standing up, staring at the parking cars. If people parked well, he went crazy; his eyes got as big as saucers; he smiled and laughed and clapped like mad. If they took a long time parking or had to flail around a lot, he went crazy the other way; he got angry and almost ended up kicking the car.
    I don’t know where this passion for cars came from, but as time went on we stopped tanning ourselves and just stared at him. He was worth watching. He was passionate, intelligent, observant; he was a mystery to us.
    I think that he didn’t look just at cars; he looked at movement, looked at time, turns, elegance. This is what made him crazy: shapes, the energy in the turns, the sweetness of a perfect piece of parking.
    A few months later they detected that the cancer had metastasized in both his lungs. That day we went down to the sun together. He didn’t have permission but we managed to smuggle him out with a false permission slip that another patient had left.
    I knew that he liked looking at the cars. We spent almost two hours there in the sun, watching them park. When we were heading back to the hospital I asked him: “Why do you like looking at cars so much, Marc?” He looked at me and asked: “Why do you all like looking at the sun so much?” I said that it wasn’t so much that we looked at the sun but that