Andrew Zitcer and Shannon Litzenberger share the belief that our attention is being diminished, and it is not accidental – it is political. They argue that creative practice done with others, like the examples they share here, can cultivate resources for collective action, mutual aid, and the pursuit of social justice.
Reader – stand up!
Find a window and look out of it.
Imagine you are seeing through the eyes of the building you are standing within.
Gaze from inside to outside.
Visualize the scene as it might change hour to hour, day to day, season to season, year to year, generation to generation.
Savour the role of witness.
Do these instructions strike you as strange? Maybe you read them and thought I’d never do that! The first time I was given a prompt like this, I reacted with cynicism and disbelief – at first.
But sitting in that stuffy conference room, suddenly I (Andrew) realized I was intrigued. What was outside these windows? What direction does this building face?
I’m a professor of city planning and cultural policy who studies the relationship between arts and democracy. Lately, I have been in lots of urgent meetings on the fate of democracy that are full of smart people. And usually, I’m just sitting at a long grey conference table or staring at little Zoom boxes while a headache brews. But as Shannon spoke, I became curious about the world outside the window, about my forsaken body, about my own creative desires. As she led us through these exercises, the other participants and I forged a bond with each other, to the here and the now.
Since then, my teaching and my research increasingly revolve around the methods we share later in this article. Every day, I see the power of this approach teaching emerging arts and planning leaders in the United States. To me, democracy is more than an abstract idea; it’s a practice created by people together in real time. To rebuild democracy in today’s perilous times, we need to get back in touch with our attention, our bodily needs and desires, our strengths, and our limitations.
***
Let me jump in (this is Shannon): as an artist working at the intersection of embodied relational practice and systems change, I design practices like the one Andrew experienced because I need them – just as urgently as he does. When I am overwhelmed by the events of the world, I lose the capacity for contemplation. I don’t have the presence needed to ask questions germane to my own thriving and to the health of the communities I serve. Instead, I am swept into a current of nervous-system activation, captured by a chaotic world and suspended in a state of constant reactivity: productive, but not fully alive. Like so many of you, I can feel how easily our attention is pulled into the churn of addictive technologies, relentless media cycles, and an economy that profits from keeping our minds constantly interrupted.
Why would an artist and an urban planner come together? Andrew and I have joined forces as collaborators because we are concerned about the future of democracy in North America.
Democracy is both a premise and a practice. It depends on the ability to deliberate collectively, which requires that we remain active participants in a system increasingly designed to remove our agency.
We share the belief that our attention is being diminished, and it is not accidental – it is political. Democracy is both a premise and a practice. It depends on the ability to deliberate collectively, which requires that we remain active participants in a system increasingly designed to remove our agency. As our capacity to connect erodes, we lose our voice, our power, and our ability to discern our own desires. And when that happens, democracy quietly snuffs itself out.
How can we recover our attention so we don’t lose our freedom?
Creative practice offers a new opening for non-profits and philanthropy: one centred on collective, embodied experiences. What inspires the creation of works of art is the act of noticing – attuning to a more expansive perceptual field of possibility. Artists have long understood this. Some have even developed tools, like composer Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, dedicated to recovering attention. Cultivating poetic and embodied forms of attention can help restore the perceptual capacities that healthy organizations and democratic societies depend upon.
Our institutions, our organizations, and our civic life depend on leaders like you, reader! – to perceive clearly, sense relational dynamics, and respond thoughtfully to the complex challenges we face together. If we build up our capacity to pay attention, it will change our agency and our well-being as individual people, and as a sector. But in this moment of ongoing crises, how do we actually put these practices to work?
***
So, reader – has your mind begun to drift over the course of the last few paragraphs? How about a quick pause to reset the attention?
Listen closely and identify an ambient sound around you.
Try to hum the exact tone you hear.
Now, try to harmonize with it.
The environment shifts its presence, from backdrop to inspiration.
This prompt is part of Activating Poetic Attention, a series of daily practices Shannon designed to disrupt default, self-in-the-world relationships by stimulating novel discoveries within familiar encounters. Through short prompts, you are invited to foreground embodied and sensory perception in order to reclaim a sense of interdependence with the world around you.
In my classroom, I turn to poetry for similar reasons. I invite students – many of whom are training to become urban planners – to write short poems about the places and communities they are studying, and then to read them aloud together. The goal isn’t polished poetry; it’s a shift in attention. Writing and sharing poems slows the room down and helps students ignite imagination, self-awareness, and communal connection. In a field oriented toward plans, policies, and outcomes, poetry reminds us that meaningful civic work begins with perception, empathy, and presence.
When practised collectively, [these exercises] can transform how groups relate to one another and to the work they are trying to accomplish.
These practices do not require elaborate facilitation. They require a willingness to sense before solving. They can be done while you’re alone. But when practised collectively, they can transform how groups relate to one another and to the work they are trying to accomplish.
The small examples you’ve encountered so far are designed as individual practices. They are simple ways of recalibrating your own field of attention. What follows are two practices intended to be done with others. What if you took these to work and proposed them as small experiments with radical intent?
When shared within teams, organizations, or even among friends and family, practices like these can reshape how people listen, relate, and act together. They create the conditions for attention to expand beyond the individual, reshaping relationships and the potential for collective action.
The Silent Walk
I (Shannon) once opened a daylong dialogue on a complex civic challenge hosted by a prominent philanthropic foundation in Toronto with a simple facilitation practice called The Silent Walk.
You might try this at the start of a one-hour meeting you are leading.
You are invited to pair up with someone you don’t already know well.
Take a silent walk outside together for 15 minutes.
One of you will be the timekeeper.
You must negotiate your route without speaking and you must return on time.
Once you and your partner cross the threshold out of the building, the silence begins. Once you cross the same threshold back inside, the exercise is complete.
Without speaking, participants have to sense one another – adjusting pace, negotiating direction, and noticing the environment they move through together. By the time they return, something has shifted. Strangers become collaborators in a small act of navigation. The conversations that follow unfold from a softer, more attentive place.
Priming a meeting with presence and shared awareness transforms how the rest of the hour unfolds. When people arrive differently, the work moves differently.
I get it – it seems far-fetched; maybe it may feel impossible. The agenda is full, and it can seem indulgent – even irresponsible – to spend a quarter of the meeting “doing nothing.” But what many teams discover is that attention is not separate from productivity. The quality of attention at the beginning of a conversation often determines the clarity of everything that follows – a small but powerful reminder that democracy begins with how we listen to one another.
I have experienced this many times in my work with colleagues in the Wild Soma Collective, a group of artists researching embodied world-making practices. To support our shared work, we gather for quarterly retreats to plan, reflect, and process our projects together.
We often arrive with long lists of tasks: reporting, planning, designing, decision-making. Yet during these retreats, nearly 80% of our time is spent doing things that might appear unrelated to the work itself: walking on the land, cooking together, moving, listening, and talking without an agenda.
At first it can feel as though nothing is getting done.
But from a place of deeper resonance, the rest of the work often happens in the final 20% of our time together. What is not essential falls away. What needs to happen becomes clearer. Decisions emerge with surprising ease.
The clarity does not come from forcing productivity. It arises in the liminal spaces – over preparing dinner together, walking through the forest, or sitting quietly with a question that matters. These moments of shared attention do not delay the work. They prepare the ground in which meaningful work can actually occur.
Ready to try another one?
The Shape of the Collaboration
One way to make visible patterns of proximity, hierarchy, and isolation is to invite a team to stand and reposition themselves physically into a shape that represents “the organization today.” Here, you’ll employ the tools of theatrical improvisation to surface unspoken organizational dynamics.
No analysis is required at first; the group simply observes. Meaning emerges from noticing and naming what is. Often there is an extraordinary amount of information available in this moment – information that might otherwise take days of conversation to uncover.
Using an open space, you are invited to arrange yourselves physically in a way that represents the current state of your collaboration. Enter the space one at a time, allowing a collective tableau to emerge.
Once the shape has formed, the group pauses.
You and the other participants are invited simply to notice.
Notice the space between bodies.
Notice where everyone stands – close together or far apart.
Notice how they face one another, their posture, their energetic tone.
I used a version of this exercise during an embodied leadership workshop with a team of C-suite executives at a major Canadian financial institution. As the tableau slowly formed, the dynamics of the team became visible almost immediately.
Here is what I saw: two senior leaders crossed their arms and turned their backs to one another. An HR director stretched her body across the space in an attempt to create connection within the group. One high-ranking executive repeatedly disrupted the activity, preventing the team from achieving its shared aim.
In that moment, the group could see – quite literally – the patterns shaping their collaboration. The body often reveals what conversation alone struggles to surface.
Organizational democracy is a precursor to civic democracy. When we practise democracy at the level of the workplace, we strengthen the muscles we need to scale up and out. Otherwise, democracy remains an abstraction, a hoped-for thing.
When shared embodied experiences are followed by shared interpretation, narrative sovereignty strengthens. Generating shared stories that grow from meaningful collective experiences is one of the most powerful ways attention can be reclaimed. Teams learn to sense together before they solve together, widening perception and allowing decisions to emerge from a richer field of awareness.
For organizations working to sustain civic life – advancing affordable housing, food security, social and mental health, climate transition, cultural vitality, and the health of democratic participation – the capacities cultivated through attentional and embodied practice are not luxuries. They are prerequisites.
This goes beyond simply reducing screen time. Voice, power, and agency are the tools organizations and individuals need to reclaim. We are at risk of losing access to a fundamental human capacity: the ability to consciously choose what we attend to and how we make meaning together. This moment in history demands more of us than distraction.
Creative practice . . . cultivates a space inside each of us that we need to become powerful actors in a world on fire.
Let’s be clear: creative practice alone will not alleviate the wider societal conditions that threaten democracy. But it cultivates a space inside each of us that we need to become powerful actors in a world on fire. When we do this work in community with others, it opens a collective space that gives us the resources for collective action, mutual aid, and the pursuit of social justice.
From that expanded perception, discernment grows, decisions deepen, and relationships strengthen. Organizations seeking to shape a more just and thriving society must begin there.
So, dear reader, I invite you to look out the window and see the world anew.
Take the time, take a deep breath, and notice what you hadn’t noticed before.
