Backwards to Move Forward
“Enthusiasm is the first step,” she said. “Artfulness comes later.”
-Scott Lynch, “The Republic of Thieves”
I sometimes work in San Francisco. I stay at a friend’s condo near a major grocery store chain in a very dense urban neighborhood (SF has 18,000 humans per square mile, out of a total population of 883,000).
They all need groceries.
In this neighborhood, there is a major chain grocery store that is easily walkable. The only parking is on the street. There is no parking lot like you would have in suburbs, or even in other urban parts of San Francisco like the Marina, Richmond or Potrero Hill.
This morning I witnessed an unusual street maneuver:
A 48’ grocery tractor trailer was moving slowly on a street, driving away from the grocery store’s off-street loading dock. I thought it might have unloaded already and was pulling away empty.
But here’s what was happening. The truck driver pulled ahead a full city block in order to straighten up, and align the 48' trailer for a reverse 90-degree turn and synch up with a loading dock. All this while going crossing a major cross street, a pedestrian sidewalk, and avoiding a large tree in a planter and a freestanding bank ATM.
He/she was pulling far away from the dock in order to align with it precisely (see photo).
Think about it. There is no way to unload 70,000 pounds of grocery freight by parking on a major cross street and using a lift gate. The only way for this grocery store to be re-stocked is by this tricky, narrow opening in the urban streetscape.
There is a lesson here for us all.
Often, we are like the loading dock waiting, waiting for a delivery. We become anxious. We don’t think the delivery will ever happen.
And then the truck arrives. We think we have been fulfilled. And then the truck pulls away!
We are devastated.
“Where is the truck going?”
“Why is it moving away from me?”
“Gloom, despair and agony on me/deep dark depression, excessive misery…” as they used to sing on Hee Haw.
If we have any kind of rejection schema or trauma hard-wired in our brains, we immediately allocate loads of letdown and disappointment to the truck pulling away, when in fact, it’s only moving away in order to precisely fit our needs.
On a second level, we need to become like that truck driver, who understands the art of hitting that dock precisely, without harming his truck, a pedestrian, the dock or spoiling any of the cargo in the trying.
He/she most likely came off the Oakland Bay Bridge or up highway 101. Stress levels are high.
He’s tying up traffic with this crazy reverse maneuver, the only one that happens to work. Yet he/she is calm and follows the proven path. It’s not a time to improvise. People need groceries.
