The Garbage Truck Test

 

I think it’s safe to say...  if you drive, you’ve been personally victimized by a garbage truck.

And if you live in a neighborhood?
5:30 a.m. becomes a horror movie.

You hear them before you see them.
That low mechanical growl rolling down the street like judgment.

And your brain goes...
Did I take the garbage out?

Because if you didn’t…
Congratulations, you’ve just been sentenced to three more days of consequences and quiet shame.

But the real test isn’t forgetting the garbage.

It’s getting stuck behind the truck.

Always at the worst time.
On the way to work.
On the way home or to something you’ve already decided matters more than whatever is happening right in front of you.

And suddenly…you’re in a life-or-death situation involving banana peels. You start negotiating with yourself...

If I just inch left…
If I time this right…
If I channel a little Jason Bourne energy…

Maybe I can slip past.

This morning, walking with Rosie and Benji, I watched three different drivers attempt what can only be described as suburban stunt driving.

One tried to swing around the truck like it was a NASCAR turn.
Another crept halfway into oncoming traffic like a polite criminal.
And one…
God bless this man…just drove directly onto someone’s lawn like he had diplomatic immunity.

The old me would’ve understood. Yeah… that’s aggressive… but I get it.

The new me? I just stood there thinking:

Are we okay? Like… collectively?

Are we so allergic to slowing down that we’ve started treating neighborhoods like obstacle courses?

Because here’s what I saw that I never used to see...The sanitation workers.

Not as obstacles. As people.

Jumping on and off the truck.
Lifting. Dumping. Moving. Repeating.
House after house. Street after street. Day after day.

No shortcuts or applause. Just work.

Good work. The kind of work that keeps everything else in our lives from piling up.

And there we are behind them, gripping the wheel like they’re personally attacking our schedule. Like their job is happening to us. Like the five minutes we’re losing is more valuable than the hours they’re giving.

It hit me standing there, dogs watching all of this with me...

We don’t just rush past garbage trucks. We rush past anything that asks us to slow down.

People. Moments.
Conversations. Our own lives.

We keep trying to get around things that might actually be here to ground us. Because slowing down feels like losing.

But what if it’s the only way we actually arrive? What if the real problem isn’t the garbage truck…

…it’s that we’ve built lives where five minutes of stillness feels like a threat?

Where being delayed feels like being disrespected. Where even a man doing his job becomes something we need to escape.

I can’t shake that we spend so much time trying to outrun inconvenience… that we don’t realize we’re also outrunning perspective. Because while we’re flooring it over someone’s lawn to save sixty seconds-

someone else is standing on the back of that truck,
doing the same hard thing they did yesterday,
and will do again tomorrow…so our mess doesn’t swallow us.

And maybe the most honest thing I can say is I used to think I was stuck behind garbage trucks.

But now I wonder…

how much of my life
I was just trying to speed past
the very things
that were cleaning me up.