A group of friends from my college days in Sri Lanka now live all over the world but we stay in touch via a monthly video conference call. Two months ago, during such a call two of them made a startling revelation. It was that while we were in college, three of us had gone on a holiday and stayed at the home of the uncle of one of them, who happened to be a physician. At one point he had taken my two friends aside and told them that because of my polio, I would not live to be much older than about forty years of age. My friends did not know what to do with this information but decided that they would not share it with me. It was only two months ago, some fifty years later, that they decided to tell me.

Needless to say, I was surprised but also amused that I had basically exceeded my shelf life by quite a long time.

But it also got me thinking. All of is know that we will die some time. But we live and make decisions for our future as if we are going to live forever, the exception being if we are given a diagnosis of having a terminal illness with a short time horizon. Then our decisions are determined by that knowledge.
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