On a dull afternoon in 2021, when the city lay hushed under the COVID lockdown, I found myself fiddling with a social audio app called Clubhouse, newly installed and unfamiliar.
I usually nap in the afternoons, but that day I stayed awake. As sunlight slanted in from the balcony and stretched across my bed, I began scrolling the app’s homepage, what it called the “hallway.”
It felt oddly physical. Like walking down a corridor and pausing at doors, weighing which one might hold a world worth entering. One title stopped me: “Daily Gratitude: What are you grateful for?”
I entered.
A stranger’s voice filled my phone. As I explored the unfamiliar layout, I realised how deliberately the app had been built. Every button was labelled. Every microphone status announced. Moderators, speakers, listeners, each role clearly defined. Accessibility was not an afterthought here. It was the architecture.
Then, without warning, a notification arrived. I was being invited to speak.
Unsure of the etiquette, I accepted. The soundscape shifted. My name now carried a new tag: speaker. When the moderator called on me, I unmuted and stumbled.
“Oh… well… I am grateful for…”
I paused. And then, impulsively, I said it.
“I am grateful for blindness.”
The words startled even me. I froze, half-expecting silence, half-expecting judgment.
“We can hear you clearly,” the moderator said. “Continue.”
So I did. For the next few minutes, I spoke of things I had spent months resisting: loss, fear, isolation, illness. I spoke of hospital wards and uncertainty, of survival measured in percentages and breath. I spoke without performance. When I finished, there was no applause, only attention.
That room became a ritual. Every evening (morning for the Americas), before that part of the world stirred, I stood on that digital stage and named what I could hold with care. Eventually, I became a moderator myself, sitting quietly as voices arrived from kitchens, balconies, and hospital beds. Like a prisoner glimpsing a slice of sky through a high window, I learned to breathe freedom through my phone as the lockdown kept the doors firmly shut.
The Evolution of the Sprint
That digital sanctuary made me relook at my past and altered how I remembered myself.
I once moved through the world at speed. I was the kind of person who sprinted to catch a bus just as it pulled away. Life was measured in velocity and visual certainty. But as my eyesight faded, gradually and without drama, the world softened into unreliability. Shadows lost their edges. Objects dissolved into doubt.
I remember stopping short before a dark shape, unsure whether it was a pole or a mere shadow streaking across the pavement. I remember my face going red with embarrassment as I imagine what people around me would think of the struggle which they do not understand.
Like anything else in life, even a blind man will have his second chance.
A few years after light receded and blindness settled in, I discovered the computer keyboard. Through screen readers and mobile technology, language returned with force. The distance between thought and expression narrowed. Words travelled again. Today, with AI interactions sharpening those tools, that distance has narrowed even further.
I work faster now. More independently. More precisely.
The First Walks with the White Cane
But before any of that, there were the footpaths in the two cities I had lived. Never free. Not even close to being clear, especially for someone who is blind.
My first walks outside home with a white cane were not acts of courage. They were rehearsals of independence. The cane felt too light, too loud when it tapped the ground, too exposing. Each tap announced me before I was ready to be known.
The footpaths were not built for negotiation. Vendors occupied corners. Vehicles edged into pedestrian space. People stopped abruptly to talk, forming dense barricades. Walking demanded constant recalibration.
Those early walks were tense. My shoulders rigid. My breath shallow. I was sealed inside effort, focused only on not colliding, not falling, not becoming spectacle.
And then help would arrive.
A hand on my arm.
A tug at my sleeve.
A brief, corrective gesture.
At the time, these moments embarrassed me. I accepted them quickly and moved on, treating them as disruptions, things to endure, not examine.
I recognise now that when I was pulled back to the centre of the footpath, I may have drifted too close to the edge and stumbled into running traffic if not for the silent, urgent hand awkwardly dragging my shirt sleeve.
I recognise it again in the hands of strangers guiding me towards the entrance of a bank or a café, wordlessly signalling where to turn, where to pause. An instinctive alignment with my struggle, offered without explanation.
What once caused irritation now feels like protection. What once embarrassed me now steadies me. I feel fortunate. I feel held. I feel overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude as Orientation
You might think gratitude is born out of disability. But tell me, who does not live with limitations of their own?
I remember an elderly woman holding my hand during a train journey. “You remind me of my late son,” she said, her tears dampening the cuffs of my shirt. That moment had nothing to do with my blindness. Truth be told, my blindness allowed me to understand her vulnerability.
Gratitude is not weakness. Nor is it a substitute for demanding accessibility, reasonable accommodation, or dignity without pity. It does not soften those demands. It sharpens the reason for them.
For me, gratitude is a spiritual instrument. It allows transcendence without denial. It acknowledges that while effort matters, outcomes remain beyond full control. That our journeys are shaped not only by systems and tools, but by an energy larger than individual will.
Gratitude tempers the instinct to assert superiority. It replaces it with recognition. It teaches compassion not as charity, but as alignment.
Gratitude, Technology and AI
I believe my encounter with AI, and everything now unfolding around it, emerged from that same space of gratitude. From accepting that choice does not guarantee outcome.
Whether I ask Gemini 3 to generate an image without knowing if it resembles what I imagined, or rely on my iPhone’s live recognition to announce a human presence that may only be a shadow, I remain exposed to uncertainty, much as I was decades ago, standing before an indistinct shape on a footpath.
Technology has shortened distances for me. It has restored speed, independence, and precision. But it has not erased ambiguity.
Gratitude keeps me grounded within that ambiguity. It sharpens my awareness of what technology can unlock and how it can mislead. It reminds me that every tool offers both direction and deviation.
When my screen reader falls silent without warning, plunging me into sudden darkness, I no longer rush to anger. I pause. I examine the failure. I document it. I warn others.
Gratitude has taught me this as well: problems rarely belong to one person alone.
In naming what breaks and how it breaks, we contribute to collective intelligence. Disability, I have learned, is not only about limitation. It is about shared navigation.
The footpaths remain chaotic. Technology still falters. My vision has not returned.
But I move through all of it differently now.
Gratitude barely softens the challenge. It gives it form. It turns frustration into information, difficulty into signal, and survival into participation.
And that, finally, is how I have learned to navigate.