Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

I’ve heard this phrase before. In a previous life I sit scrolling endlessly on Reddit, when a video in my feed starts auto-playing. A man in a trucker-hat stands with both of his palms pressing into a black table. An orange and white Stihl chainsaw sits before him. A buzzer sounds at the exact same moment that an adjacent competition timer originally showing 0:00.00 near the edge of the frame begins counting the milliseconds. With a well-paced buttered smoothness the man in a trucker-hat uses an allen key to unscrew two brass bolts on the orange casing, remove the guide bar from the hard plastic body of the small engine, concurrently swapping the original chain with a new one already laid out into shape with impressive precision by simply sliding the razor-thin guide bar into it. He then reattaches the guide bar keeping the chain taught around the clutch as he does so, and screws the bolts back in. Stopping the timer in 0:08.27 seconds. An official looking commissioner of sorts checks his hands to ensure no foul play, and the winner is confirmed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZATX_mTube8?si=lNl1rkb4d2tkmCln

One of the top comments in the section below the video on Reddit garnered quite a bit of useless internet karma repeating the adage “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”, and it stuck with me, though I don’t remember to practice it enough.

I sit here tonight watching Season Two of The Pitt for the second time through and during an intense intake situation involving emergency trauma surgery Dr. Santos had to do this sort of but not really intubation of some sort¹ and was told “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” as guidance by Dr. Abbot as she ran the tube through a gored and bloody throat hole. It sparked the above memory of that man and his chainsaw. And by writing this I’m trying to work out why it inspired me to write about it.

Perhaps it’s because it implies a flow state, probably one of the most ideal states of being for any human. Even though it often occurs at work in our modern society I theorize it can only occur at work if you truly enjoy what you’re doing spiritually, to get lost and almost dissociate from it, and be good enough at it that the quality does not suffer when you do. Which is the hardest part. Impossible to do with something like an overbearing boss no matter how much you actually love the work you’re doing. Trust me.

I say this now, on the other side of the looking glass from an occupation in which my existence was hinged, a subject and medium in which I thrived in and was prepared for both in education and passion, my trade. Nearly every day my goal was to achieve this flow state, to work without care or knowledge of the outside world with productivity and an end goal for each project. I rarely found it possible for me, due to the aforementioned overbearing micro-manager of a boss who had the unfortunate philosophy that if you as an employee of his weren’t going at a breakneck pace you were simply wasting his time and money. We were treated the same way he treated his equipment. The printers, scanners, and even his cameras ran at full blast at all times, pushed to the brink of mechanical and in the case of us humans, emotional failure.

When the catastrophic emotional failure occurred for me ² I was as far away from the studio as possible. I’ve since found an occupation in which I thrive, not because it provides spiritual and creative fulfillment, but because I can finally let my mind go.

Fine, I’ll say it, I’m a janitor. Well, the proper nomenclature we prefer in my district is ‘Custodian’.³ A title I often find myself resenting with a sort of cultural resentment and personal frustration when I look back on my entire life thus far, and contrast with my current abilities. As any wishy-washy centrist cursed with the ability to play devils advocate for just about anything and everything, I can justify my current career as both beneficial for my family and myself for the plethora of reasons a municipal government job can provide the sort of existential security our modern capitalist culture demands from those like me who do not thrive in it the way others do, and for cursing the station the train of my life dropped me off at. I still believe I was destined for something bigger, that I am smarter and better than this job.

What use does this existential dread do for me though? I’m coming to terms with it. Mostly. As my wife and I like to joke; I’m a work in progress. The benefits of my current occupation both tangible and intangible are incalculable, regardless of cultural and personal expectations. It is a place I can finally put the phrase that inspired this thought puke of a blog post—“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”—to use. Where I can zone out, finally enter a flow state, enjoy the auditory indulgence of podcasts, books, and music to my hearts content, and best of all, treat myself to a healthier mental and physical lifestyle this occupation has enabled. All without paying the extraneous emotional toll of bringing my work anxiety home to my family like I did previously.

While writing this I was only envisioning this phrase towards tasks, but perhaps I should apply the blogs titular adage to life as a whole. I remember the words of my capstone mentor from my senior year of undergrad, whom I did not lean on enough, but just enough to carry this now even more relevant advice with me; “You don’t want your creative career to be a flash-in-the-pan, you want to go for a slow burn.” Maybe my life’s trajectory isn’t supposed to be this breakneck, anxiety-ridden success as it had once felt, but rather I should aim for the slow, smooth, and steady burn of an existence that in the end, will end up feeling fast enough, like I was just getting started.

Footnotes

1. I’m not a doctor and it’s the only term I can think to use because the procedure involved a tube. ↩

2. As it did shortly after for other employees. ↩

3. Which, in my personal experience and observations here, has this lexical provenance that I feel has lost its meaning over the years. But that’s likely a post for another day. ↩