From the author: I remember how, once, having decided to plant pine trees behind the fence of my garden, I suddenly clearly realized that when they grew up and finally blocked our house from road dust, I will no longer be a young woman, and my grandchildren, who I hope will be born, will already be twenty years old. At such a thought, my heart grew cold, and I no longer wanted to plant pine trees. As a result, “large-sized pines” were planted. Entering the period of midlife crisis, a change in the sense of time occurs. All ideas about the future must now be balanced with the thought of the time we have left to live. The realization that time is running out is overwhelming, and thoughts arise: “It’s too late to start something new now.” The paradox is that after we get out of the crisis, the feeling of depression and depression will leave us, despite the fact that there will be even less real time left. We will again see the future in the right perspective because we will again have faith and purpose in life. At the age of forty-two, Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy described the feelings that he himself had experienced since the age of thirty-seven: Having completed half my earthly life, I found myself in a dark forest, Having lost the right path in the darkness of the valley. What was it like, oh, how I will say That wild forest, dense and threatening, Whose long-standing horror I carry in my memory! It is so bitter that death is almost sweeter. But, having found good in it forever, I will tell you about everything that I saw in this thicket. (translation by M. Lozinsky) We know that any crisis signals that the old has outlived its usefulness and something new must be formed. A good way out of a crisis is patience. But not everyone has enough of it. Then, perhaps, an appeal to faith, or an appeal to creativity. Both fill existence with new meaning. A striking example is Gauguin. At thirty-five he left his career in banking and at forty-one became a leading exponent of Post-Impressionism. During the transition to middle age, Margaret Mead broke the entire structure of her personal life and the life of a professional scientist and began to engage in activities related to human mental health. Research by scientists is encouraging. And it is precisely during “middle age” that the greatest rise in scientific creativity occurs. The peak of creative activity among doctors and geographers is 35-40 years old; physicists, chemists and mathematicians - from 30 to 34 years old; The age of the main discoveries and ideas among representatives of fundamental disciplines, including philosophy, is between 40 and 60 years. Some emerge from this period stronger, firmly standing on their feet, and confident in themselves. Someone destroys everything he had, and then, coming to his senses, tries to return it, but it’s too late. Others find a different path, discover new possibilities in themselves and become even happier than before. Of course, it can hardly be assumed that each of us, having experienced a severe crisis, will necessarily emerge from it reborn. But if you still decide to reassess values, then, most likely, you can gain NEW KNOWLEDGE ABOUT YOURSELF and SURVIVE.