Slow returns

Found it! is an occasional blog series by ArtsPond Founder, Jessa Agilo. In this article, Jessa describes how unexpected health challenges led to insights about slowness, care, and resilience. These lessons guide our future activities amid a rapidly changing world.

Updated February 17, 2026

A quiet year. A slow return.

If you visited our website over the past year, you may have noticed an unusual quiet. Unexpectedly, I needed to step away for a long stretch to recover from significant health challenges. Without the resources needed to hire a temporary replacement, my work simply had to pause.

The past year became a time of rest, recalibration, and deeply internal learning and healing. It offered a chance to reinhabit my life and work with more gentleness.

Now I am easing my way back into the pond, and honestly, back into the world, with a renewed sense of clarity.

Practicing slowness in a culture of urgency

The pace of change in our world has become hard to grasp.

Overwork and burnout have been common in the arts for decades. We have been used to juggling many hats, and being forced to remain flexible to big changes in the system that are out of our control.

Now, a wider culture of 996 and grindcore is shaping everyday life, not only in arts and culture, as people everywhere are pushing themselves to keep up with the upheaval created by AI. Many are deeply unsure about what the future holds. Tech bros appear to hold the cards.

In this environment, my own year of practicing slowness in the face of personal adversity and collective urgency has taught me many lessons. I did not choose them, yet I am grateful for them.

I am learning (and relearning) to embrace:

• Slowness over urgency
• Rest over exhaustion
• Access and care over control or competition
• Meaning over performance
• Humanity over perfectionism
• Just enough over never enough
• Presence over distraction
• Connection over isolation
• Steadiness over hustle and bustle
• Compassion over criticism
• Allyship and alignment over obligation
• Curiosity over certainty
• Long-term wealth and health over short-term wins

And the list continues to grow. These values feel especially important in such unsettled times. Stepping back showed me the quiet power of letting go, even for a season. Often the softest moments are the ones that teach us the most.

Moving forward, gently

As I return, I am committed to carrying these lessons into the work we do here. I am choosing a slower, steadier, more thoughtful pace. One that I hope honours both the people we serve and the people we are.

Thank you for your patience this past year. I am grateful to still be here, and grateful for you.

Let’s reconnect soon. I would love to hear from you and what matters to you most now.

What’s coming up next

The year ahead is still taking shape. The organization has also faced several significant challenges that we have not yet fully recovered from. More details about these challenges, and our responses, will be shared in the months ahead.

Over the past year, our part-time, temporary Care Team for 2025 helped us complete two fellowships exploring the future of post-pandemic and youth-led social change and care. These programs, Caring Cultures and I Love My Gig Ontario, brought together 23 Fellows from across Ontario. The Fellows shared nearly 60,000 words of writing, more than 124 images, 30 minutes of audiovisual work, and a range of other multimedia contributions. Their work will be published on our website in the next month or so, including here for Caring Cultures and here for I Love My Gig Ontario.

This spring, we will share our own stories and suggestions from several years of building new digital ecosystems and platforms supported by the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Strategy Fund. We apologize that sharing these lessons has taken so much longer to gestate than we ever imagined. The stresses of the pandemic, growing forest fire emergencies and the climate crisis, deepening transphobia, global wars and economic conflict, the rapid emergence of AI, internal doubts, misgivings, false starts, pivots, and others barriers pulled out the floor from under our feet many times. What we originally thought might take months instead took years. The game has changed so much in that time. But we carry many of the lessons of the past into the future.

This summer, we expect to launch two new fellowships exploring the intersections of disability and economic justice in the digital world. Pending available funding, we also hope to expand our youth mentorship program, introduce a new community membership benefit with affordable access to digital transformation tools and support, begin planning a new symposium on social change and care in arts and culture, and introduce a new e-learning program on just futures in the age of evolving cloud computing and AI.

While the crash of our website at the end of last year has been a setback, I also continue to work on a suite of new digital tools to support the community. Among others, these include open publishing in the Creative Commons and a community opportunity board featuring jobs, gigs, funding, open calls, and more.

Stay tuned for upcoming updates related to these and other activities.