Early one June morning, I received a text message from my friend Howard’s wife, Sandy, asking if we could speak as soon as possible. The news was far worse than I had anticipated. My friend Howard, at the age of 65, had suddenly died of a heart attack.

As I drove down to Delaware to officiate at the funeral, it struck me that this was the second unexpected loss I had suffered in the past two years. Almost two years to the day, my father had died of pancreatic cancer. Just a couple of months before his diagnosis, my father had been a “young” 85-year-old, walking two and a half miles each way to shul on Shabbat. Yet cancer quickly brought my father’s life to an earlier close than anyone had anticipated.

These losses reminded me of Kohelet’s words, which appear at the beginning of the Yizkor service: “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.”

It struck me as deeply ironic that both Howard and my father had been planners by nature, always playing the long game of life. Yet their lives did not last as long as they had anticipated.

Obviously, Howard and my father were right to play the long game. The ability to plan ahead is crucial to succeeding in life, as demonstrated by the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, led by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the experiment, preschoolers were given a choice: they could receive one marshmallow immediately, or wait 15 minutes and receive two. Children who were able to delay gratification were found to have better long-term outcomes, including higher SAT scores, lower BMI, and better coping skills.

Just imagine your financial advisor’s reaction if you announced that you no longer wanted to invest for the future because your only concern was the present. Your advisor would probably laugh you out of the room and tell you to forget about retiring.

Yet........

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