Read also other contributions about holidays with people who have disabilities
For five summers now, I have gone on vacation with my friends—some of them affected in body or mind in various ways.
At first, the idea of camping with them left me uncertain. I wondered if it would truly be a "holiday" or simply another burden, stealing time from the rest I needed, however brief, as someone who studies and works.
I asked myself what it meant to accept the invitation, what to expect, what would happen in me if I said yes. The proposal was to spend days with people unlike me, to look them in the face in all their difference, and to share not just a few hours—as happens during the year—but all the small gestures of daily life: eating, dressing, caring for ourselves.
What did these camping trips awaken in me? What path did they open?
Among countless answers, one contains them all:
they confronted me with "difference"—presented it in its stark, difficult reality in a way I could not ignore.
It is terribly uncomfortable to acknowledge difference. We fear it because it marks the limit of our ability to understand, the failure of what we thought were reliable tools, and it strips bare our disturbance. Difference exposes our powerlessness, revealing it almost violently. This is why we prefer to pretend it does not exist.
They confronted me with "difference"—presented it in its stark, difficult reality in a way I could not ignore.
This touches me closely, because as a medical student, I meet "difference" every day—understood as a reality of suffering, of illness that goes beyond the pathology we learn to name. Against that, our "science" cannot help. All of this shakes our certainties, threatens our peace, calls us into question.The sick person—the one who carries difference within himself, and with it pain—demands that we stand exposed, stepping out from behind the science in which we have fortified ourselves, revealing all our poverty before what is most mysterious and inscrutable in a human being: his terrible mystery.
We are taught the laws by which our bodies work, and we learn to master them. It is deeply reassuring. But what do we do when we meet the complete defiance of those laws? Or when we enter the part of a human being for which no laws can exist?
Those days camping with my friends invited me not to flee, but to learn to accept difference, to acknowledge it.
Once I took that step, I noticed something else: during those vacations, I was well. I did not want to leave when it was time. So it is possible not only to admit difference, but to live with it—and to live with it joyfully.
I discovered that when you open yourself to the heart of another, you can see the treasure that lives there, hidden until we let it be found.
I discovered that when you open yourself to the heart of another, you can see the treasure that lives there, hidden until we let it be found.The people most wounded, those whose suffering cries out, lived alongside me. Together we shared beautiful days, we gave each other our gifts, and yes—our joy.
This was my discovery: you can live with difference.
I found that when you enter a little deeper into the heart of each person, you can appreciate the treasure hidden there—if only we shed the frameworks that have become the new commandments of our world: efficiency, physical prowess, competition. These pit us against one another and suffocate the smallest, the weakest among us, stripping them of the freedom to show their gifts according to their own rhythm and ability.
It is competition that turns difference into handicap. On these vacations we did simple things together: no mountain climbing, no diving, but small walks. We sat in the sun. We sang. We played—really played, the way we have forgotten how. And we felt the freedom to express ourselves in all our particularity, without competition, each in our own way. This is how "difference" becomes "uniqueness"—each person's singular, unrepeatable self.
A vacation that shook my certainties, that made me reconsider my securities and absolutes, so I could accept being troubled and discover that beyond what I had imagined, it is possible to live alongside those who frighten us most, receiving unexpected gifts in friendship and joy. I learned that this, too, can be a vacation. A true one.
