say instead

Reader, when you have spent some time in the presence of someone using a wheelchair, or flapping their hands, or wielding a cane, or bearing up under a cloud of depression, say not to yourself oh now I shall be grateful for my life. Push past this quickest reflexive impulse, which is to compare your relative capacities as though on a scale of diminishment, to measure your lot. What looks like your gleaning wisdom is a falsity, for each of these conditions is its own and distinctive habitation. Flattening your encounter into a lesson does no good for you, nor for anyone else.

No, say instead: I will live here too. I live here in this same universe where the body is a patchwork: a body built with others, the seams showing, an open assemblage. A body at once precarious, thriving, alternately frustrated or balletic, extended by instruments visible or invisible. But a patchwork nonetheless. A patchwork is the body’s truest state.