Nine dots arranged in three rows at regular intervals must be connected by a maximum of four lines without lifting the pencil from the page (do you know the answer? Try before reading on). Most people who tackle this puzzle—originally proposed by the Gestalt school of psychology and recalled by Angelo Lascioli in "Italian Journal of Special Education for Inclusion" 2, 2016—see the nine dots forming a square and, when drawing the lines, always try to stay within it. But the solution lies precisely in going beyond: that square is a trick our brain plays on itself, a way of fitting the world's formless stimuli into something familiar. Much the same happens when we cannot escape from a mental pattern we've locked in place: facing a person with a disability, we see the impairment or the illness or the syndrome that caused it, not the person in their wholeness. The template of a human being in our minds has no room for uncontrolled movements, malformations, physical limitations, or strange behaviors. Disability becomes a category apart, with all that follows, rather than one possibility among the many that arise from the complexity of life—a complexity we should all recognize in ourselves.
The weakness and limits we attach to it push us to exclude that possibility, at least for as long as we can, and in doing so we lose much of our own humanity in this missed encounter. But here is the good news: our minds can be trained. Simply being aware of these automatic patterns is already a strong first step. The second—and we have been convinced of this for fifty years through Fede e Luce and nearly forty through Ombre e Luci—is to meet and know people with disabilities, their families, their stories, and to learn, truly, how to look at them. The hymn composed for Fede e Luce's fiftieth anniversary (which we will feature in our fourth issue) calls us to do exactly this, with simple and heartfelt words that repeat the verb "to look" five times and emphasize "in the face" in one of the verses. The third step will be what the philosopher Alexandre Jollien—who lives with cerebral palsy—asks of us: recognizing that "life is, in truth, something serious and difficult… yet we will do everything we can to make it beautiful, joyful, and marked by solidarity" (OL n.79). Let's roll up our sleeves and begin to walk.