So, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Now, I realize that some of you are still growing up—but I’ve never met ANYONE who said “I wanted to work with retirement plans”—and that includes me.
Indeed, what we aspire to become in our youth is complex—and often
shaped by our experience(s) at the time. And while I am sure there was a
period in my youth when I wanted to be a fireman, a cowboy, or maybe
even a professional athlete (that one didn’t last long), my earliest
memories are of wanting to be an astronaut—an aspiration that came to
mind again last week on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
It was a magical time for our nation’s space program. There was a plan,
three separate programs (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo) designed with
specific mission objectives to help us get there, and a vision—as
President John F. Kennedy said in May 1961—of “achieving the goal,
before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning
him safely to the Earth.” There was also a sense of national urgency
(the so-called “Space Race” with the Soviets), and, while throughout its
life the program was remarkably bereft of injury, the tragedy of the
February 1967[i] fire on Apollo 1 that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee reminded us of the stakes involved.
And then, after years of watching Americans enter space, circle the
planet, exit their craft while circling the planet (at unimaginable
speeds), and then leave Earth’s orbit to touch the lunar sky, came that
one Sunday July evening in 1969. I can still remember the grainy
black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man”
flickering across the screen of my family’s small black-and-white
television (replete with its aluminum foil-festooned “rabbit ears”)—the
anniversary of which was just last week. It was, as Neil Armstrong is
said to have intended to say, “a small step for a man…a giant leap for
mankind.”
It doesn’t take much imagination to draw a correlation between the
planning for a landing on the moon and a successful arrival in
retirement (OK, so maybe it takes a little
imagination). Both require a notion of what constitutes a successful
“arrival,” an idea of the steps that will be required to get there, the
tenacity and ingenuity to deal with the inevitable bumps along the way[ii] (remember the example of Apollo 13)—and the specificity of a date certain to give some structure to those plans.
That said, and as we ponder the accomplishments and planning that helped
our nation put astronauts in space and on the moon—and that one day may
take us further—it’s worth remembering that our “mission” is not only
to get tomorrow’s retirees safely to retirement, to take those “small
steps” along the way—but ultimately to position them and their finances
to carry them safely through retirement… to a safe landing at their “tranquility base.”
- Nevin E. Adams, JD
[i] Of course, the January 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger reminded us anew and afresh of those dangers.
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