Harriet McBryde Johnson writes the "Lives" column in yesterday’s NYT Magazine.   She is disabled and has written about her life extensively.  Her encounters with philosopher Peter Singer, who takes a rather dim utilitarian view of disability, are bracing. 

     What struck me about her most recent piece was its ending:

I haven’t forgotten that two million people remain in U.S. disability
institutions, that some disabled children still cannot attend
mainstream schools, that too many of us live in poverty. But I can’t
hold onto anger and sorrow in this room. It is too full of life. Behind
the laughs I keep getting, I feel a shared sense of possibility, a
drive for a world that will embrace both the fit and the unfit and hold
them so dear that the categories die.

     "…that the categories die."  Where she leaves off is where Chuang Tzu begins.  He rejects the act of making distinctions, suggesting that it takes us away from seeing the unique place each things has in the totality of all things:

In the Spring and Autumn Annals, where it tells about the ancient emperors, it says the sage explains but never divides.  Hence in difference there’s no difference, and in division there’s no division.  You may ask how this can be.  The sage embraces it all.  Everyone else divides things, and uses one to reveal the other.  Therefore, I say: "Those who divide things cannot see." (27)

     If we divide things then we cannot see what Johnson sees.  If we see only limitation and tragedy in disability we miss the life that fills the room, the "shared sense of possibility".