Can you accept what you cannot change? Should you?

Two months after her ALS diagnosis, Hanna stood before a crowd of people—using a ventilator to breathe, friends to speak her words when her mouth ran out of stamina—and asked the audience to practice making gross noises with her. To cup their hands behind their ears if they couldn’t hear. To breathe through the tears that were coming, the 90% forecast for crying.

Then she took them through her own attempts at acceptance: the white-knuckled forcing of it after divorce, the fury-filled throwing of snowballs at a frozen pond while screaming “I hate this!”, the desperate scampering through past mistakes looking for what she did wrong, the moment of asking “Is life worth living with ALS?” What follows is unflinching and tender. Personal and political. She refuses to separate her dying from the world’s dying—extinct species, melting glaciers, people silenced to avoid harm.

Near the end she asks:

“How do we feast on this precious gift amidst the pain, loss and hurt, and extend that life-sustaining-force outwards? How do we say yes to the mess and co-create with it?”

Her answer is, practice. Not acceptance as embrace, but practice as showing up: allowing space to rage without getting stuck there, bringing devastation into community, trusting each other to hold us, resting into life’s abundance.

This is a masterclass in holding shadow and light together.