Accepting that you alone have the power to change your attitude and your life means leaving the comfort of being a victim, which can be scary. However, choosing to live with others controlling you and your life is even scarier — at least for me.

Please don’t allow anyone else to dictate your life and choices. Don’t let someone create a victim of you. Unless you have debilitating decision making difficulties, no matter how hard or long the road, you are the one who determines your happiness or misery.

Of course, none of us are happy or sad all the time, despite those trials and passages of time that can’t help but sadden us from event to event.

Grief cannot, and should not be, postponed. It’s a required process for us to move forward.

There are many types of grief besides the death of a loved one. We might mourn the ending of a life stage, such as when basic parenting leaves us in an empty nest, or the loss of our career due to cutbacks, business closures or other major changes to our financial status.

It might be a marriage or divorce that we mourn. It might be losing our youth or dealing with serious health issues.

They seem heaped up and piled on in our senior years, so don’t wait to take that trip or anything else on your dream list. Do it and do it as soon as possible — now, if you can. Don’t postpone things that you know will bring you joy.

Don’t save things for special occasions either because every single day is a special occasion, so wear it, use it and enjoy it.

All our lives, my late husband and I sacrificed to save money — for emergencies and for our old age. A few years ago, I tried to persuade him to cash in some investments to take our dream trip — a full year of motoring across the country without an agenda and staying off the interstates. For years we discussed it. We wanted to see things off the beaten path, meet the regular folks we encountered and write human interest stories to go with photos about it in a journal.

Whenever the subject came up, it was me who was ready in a heartbeat to hit the road. He always hesitated, knowing how hard he had worked to accumulate our nest egg that we both had striven to build. It always seemed to keep him from committing to spending it.

Exasperated one day, I asked why he always put it off. His response, “I’m saving it for our old age.”

“This is our old age!” I retorted. Spending nearly 60 years to accumulate it, it was heartbreakingly difficult for him to spend and enjoy it. Now I’m left to fend off the “rainy days” without my companion — for anything.