It’s very quiet outside.  I can hear all the birds singing.  No cars or motorcycles on Beach Drive.  What is normally a sleepy beach town near the city is even more sleepy.

I was on a conference call yesterday - the only way to work in groups now - with New York, Bogota and Barranquilla, Colombia.  The loan broker from New York had the same comment that the birds were out, and you could actually hear them singing.  The same in Bogota: silence, bird songs and animals venturing out into the city.  I said they were wondering, “Where have all the humans gone?” The seaport builder in Bogota said, “Unfortunately, they may be saying to themselves, thank God the humans have gone!”

William and I are closely aligned in our thinking about the planet, the environment and sustainability. On my first trip to Barranquilla to learn about an infrastructure project called Royal Port that I would be working on, we made a great connection during a break in the meetings.  William was my interpreter, and I welcomed the chance to speak English for a moment, as holding a meeting in Spanish and not knowing much of the language, especially the local dialect of Costegna, was intense and challenging.  

So yesterday, he reminded me again of why we have that connection: always consider our environment.

The coronavirus is awful.  It kills indiscriminately and preys on the weak and strong alike.  It has completely upended most lives on the planet, all at once, and we have all had to stop what we are doing, stay home, and in the US, stop buying things.  This hurts many people, but the planet seems to be taking a deep breath.  The air is clean, most notably.  No smokestacks, no tailpipes.  The planet has found a way to force sustainability on us: the virus.

It is funny that this real-life story for all of us has been played out in stories written by great authors in the past about repelling alien invaders.  War of the Worlds.  How did the aliens die?  A virus.  Independence Day?  A computer virus.  We all saw it coming, but nature is too powerful to be contained.

I am enjoying the virus outage in many ways.  Of course, no one in my household has it at the moment, and no one I know has succumbed to it, so I don’t have that tragedy close at hand.  What I have today is less stress from working and commuting, more time with family, less spending, and more time to exercise - more quality time as it’s referred to.  More time to be a human that lives and not one that works and consumes so much.

The world's leaders have organized great summits for sustainability, and political battles have raged over these issues, but nature has finally made the call on how to do it and how to live more in balance with nature.  Humans could never conceive of a strategy that would halt most activity worldwide.  Nature made that move and reminded us who our host is in the house we live in.