You know you have Crossed the Half Way Mark when…

You sit down at a party and it feels good.

The medicine cabinet in the bathroom is full of little pillboxes with expired dates and you never get to throw any away because who knows, you might need them some day.

You find yourself prefacing your sentences with, “In my time”…

Noise irritates you .

You keep asking people to stop mumbling and speak up, for heaven’s sake.

You hear people discussing their symptoms and swapping ailments and you find you are enjoying the contribution you are making. What’s most awesome, you have a contribution to make.

All the job vacancy ads are for people 20 years younger than you are and you find this utterly ridiculous, after all, Is their no price for experience?

You go on to play an outdoor game  and you find folks are cheering you, out of sympathy, for your courage rather than your game. Gutsy guy they exclaim, this game at this age and it bugs you to no end.

Everyone is always telling you to slow down, you aren’t young anymore. You pick up the Reader’s Digest and John’s Vital Organs .

Your children say, oh, you wouldn’t understand.

You have the same relationship with a flight of stairs that a mongoose has with a cobra. You get a twinge and you think this is it.

You replay your funeral in your mind.You realise out of the blue that you are never going to run 100 metres again.

It’s your back. It is always your back. You are cutting out more than you are keeping in.

You read about some comet coming around next time in 2026 and you know you’ll be history by then. You no longer avoid your life insurance agent. In fact you call him to call on you.

You find it enormously annoying that people begin to make decisions for you without your say so. How come they know what is good for you?

You resent the fact that young people think all you need is soup, a blanket, your reading glasses and a book.

You find you are a better grandparent than a parent.

You wonder why virtue must replace happy wickedness and that glint in the eye purely because you have notched a few more years into your belt.

You cannot figure out why young people have nothing to say to old people.

You hate the idea that the world will carry on very well without you and that is a fact. People you grew up with begin to fall away like battle-weary troops and you find that the newspaper obituaries are not only required reading but you can identify the ones that appear in them.

You are certain the world is going to hell in a hand basket and you wonder how this lot can ever hack it, seeing as how they have neither the moral courage, nor the savvy nor the staying power of your generation.

You find younger people engaging in aggravated politeness around you and you can’t understand why they cannot behave naturally.

You hope somebody will argue, refute or simply cut your theory to pieces because you are heartily sick of everyone conceding the point in deference to your age and not the merit of your stand.

You know you are way past the halfway house when…You still have so much to offer but no one will hang around long enough to listen.