"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present," Alan Watts observed in his magnificent meditation on the art of timing half a century before our paradoxical modern mecca of ever-multiplying procrastination options amid a Productivity Rush in which we're mining every last frontier of sanity and stillness for the tiniest nugget of precious efficiency. "Of all ridiculous things,"Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating our greatest source of unhappiness nearly two centuries earlier, "the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work." Somehow, even if we know that we habitually miss most of what is going on around us, we rarely break our busy gait on the hamster wheel of goal-chasing. And yet when we do pause – be it by will or, perhaps more commonly, by accident – the miraculous reveals itself in the mundane.
That's what longtime collaborators Maira Kalman and Daniel Handlerexplore in the immensely wonderful children's-book-for-grownups Hurry Up and Wait (public library) – the second installment in their collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, following their quirky Girls Standing on Lawns.
Hurry Up and Wait: Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman’s Whimsical Children’s Book for Grownups about Presence in the Age of Productivity
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