These are scary and uncertain circumstances that we are living through. The speed with which the Coronavirus took over our lives is truly transcendent and unparalleled, causing us to face overwhelming challenges. However, on a day when there was snow on the ground in March and Tom Brady announced that he is leaving the Patriots, you wonder how we could extract some positives from our current lives.
But we have to . . .
Life as we know it has slowed down, which is actually not a bad thing. Business trips have been cancelled, our company has transitioned to a work at home operation, and we are trying to transition at least temporarily to interface with investors, developers, and their professional advisors using video meetings rather than in-person meetings. Whether this will work or not we don’t know, and on some level I both hope so and I don’t because while working from home can be a new and exciting endeavor I feel that we will eventually be worse off because business is based on relationships and personal connections, which need a certain amount of personal interaction to develop.
Nevertheless, here I am typing on my computer with my dog on my lap and my house filled with children that would otherwise be away at College. We are cooking meals together, taking walks in the neighborhood, binge watching TV shows together, and even making Tik-Tok dance videos. Oh, and we played Monopoly for the first time in over 15 years. On some level there is also a realization that the daily things we ordinarily worry about are just not that serious or important after all. So maybe these times and experiences will be an enduring positive for us, and we will become closer in our individual family units and then be kinder with each other in the outside world.
The poet Lynn Ungar in her aptly titled poem “Pandemic” in my opinion summarized it best when she said, “reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands.”
Warren founded Cherrytree in 2011 and has spent the past eleven years building a highly specialized tax credit consultation, brokerage, and syndication firm. He has relied on three decades of experience and a law background to focus on the structural and development finance aspects of tax incentivized real estate-based transactions — particularly in the environmental remediation (Brownfields), renewable energy, and historic rehabilitation areas.