Ease vs. speed
The faster I try to hang the laundry, the more clothespins I drop. (Image by Willi Heidelbach)
Whenever I’ve played something impressively fast and intricate on the piano, it’s been easy.
That doesn’t mean I’m amazing at the piano. I’m just saying that’s how it works. Once your fingers learn the mechanics of what they are supposed to do, the moves become ingrained in your muscle memory and it all flows.
Getting to this point requires slow, deliberate practice. Ironically, there is no speed involved in the learning process. The speed comes later, without even trying, as long as you’re staying relaxed and playing the notes correctly.
Therefore, if we want to perform at a peak level, we have to go for perception of ease, not the perception of speed. When we go for speed, it will always backfire—we’ll just be hurrying. Instead, we want a feeling of ease built into every movement, right from the start.
Many of us have a resistance to the idea of ease. We’ve been told that anything worth doing requires hard work, and we’ve been rewarded over the years for that hard work (and punished for lack thereof). We might believe that achieving great things requires moving toward a big, scary goal as fast as we possibly can. The idea of scaling back our expectations of ourselves by taking slower, smaller steps feels like a cop-out.
However, in pursuing the big challenges in life, we must still maintain that sense of ease along the way. A marathon pace is slower than a 10K pace because it needs to be sustained for a longer distance. The run itself is made up of steps, one after the other, just like any big project. Each step has to be as loose and relaxed as possible to avoid unnecessary fatigue and stress. Trying to go faster creates the opposite effect.
Hurrying makes us agitated and prone to mistakes. Slow, methodical, intentional moves will not delay us the way we might think. They allow us to save time and energy, reduce anxiety, and make decisions from a centered, calm place.
After consistent practice at a given skill, we’ll find that we can operate faster than we might have thought possible when we began—faster, even, than we can think. This is what you see when athletes are performing incredible feats. They are no longer mentally controlling the process and have let the body take over. It looks easy because it is easy. The grace was built in from the start, and now the speed is a natural consequence of a confident, well-practiced sequence.
It’s demoralizing to aspire to a high level of performance and realize just how much work it will take to attain it. It’s reasonable to choose not to put a decade into mastery if there are other things you’d rather be doing. But the path forward doesn’t have to be raw and grueling every minute of every day. You start where you are, with one tiny action, and polish it until it feels easy instead of zipping ahead to the next one. This is how we grow and learn.
Whatever project you wish to undertake—writing a novel, designing a home, raising a child—you will be better off to seek a feeling of ease instead of a feeling of speed. I doubt it will take you longer to get where you’re going; in fact, I think you’re more likely to get there in the first place. At the very least, the whole experience will be more enjoyable. Instead of trying to rush through it, you’ll be present and mindful, taking each challenge as it comes.
Is there a project you’ve been making more difficult than it needs to be as a result of your expectations? In what area might you slow down and look for the feeling of ease? As usual, I’d love to hear in the comments.
