By Paul Alexander Wolf

I have no idea why some impressions remain for a lifetime while others disappear by the following Tuesday.

Africa has reappeared often enough in my life that I have stopped pretending to be surprised.

As life evolves, I find myself less fascinated by explanations that explain very little and more interested in observations. Curiosity remains one of my most reliable guides.

Less than a week ago, I received a message connected to humanitarian medical work in Gaza. The invitation was admirable, worthwhile and deeply sincere. It also triggered an unexpected train of thought.

Not about Gaza.

About South Africa.

This may seem an unusual sequence of associations. It seemed slightly odd to me as well.

Yet the connection made sense once I recognised what was happening.

I have noticed recurring themes.

Looking back, I am struck by how certain people, places, questions, promises and even pieces of music seem to accompany us through life. They disappear for a while, only to reappear years later in different forms.

One of the earliest examples I can remember involves a childhood friend, Jan Keesje van de Vreugde.

Jan Keesje died at the age of six as a result of leukaemia.

I was five.

Shortly before he died, I visited him. During that visit he gave me a record which he had played many times himself. It contained organ music by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by Albert Schweitzer.

At the time, none of this seemed particularly remarkable.

I did not know who Schweitzer was.

I knew nothing about Africa.

I knew nothing about medicine, theology or philosophy.

I simply knew that Jan Keesje was my friend.

I was just a child, as he was.

After he died, I found myself returning to the record again and again.

The music became ingrained.

Looking back, I suspect I was grieving in the way children often grieve. Not through analysis or understanding, but through repetition.

Something in the music drew me back.

I could not have explained it then.

In truth, I am not entirely sure I can explain it now.

Looking back, I suspect there was something in that music that I could not possibly have articulated at the age of five. A faint awareness that life is temporary, that those we love do not remain with us forever, and perhaps an equally faint awareness that we are connected to something far larger than ourselves.

I would not have possessed the language for such thoughts as a child.

I only knew that the music drew me back.

With time, I learned to express some of those intuitions more clearly. Yet even now, when I listen to the same music, something of that original feeling remains.

Occasionally I find myself wondering what might have happened had I never met Jan Keesje, never received that record and never listened to that particular music so many times.

There is obviously no way of answering such questions.

Yet they remind me that human beings are already being formed long before they understand that formation is taking place.

Even at the age of five.

Some of the deepest experiences of our lives occur long before we have the language to understand them.

As children, we absorb far more than we realise. A friendship, a loss, a piece of music, a gesture of kindness or a sense of wonder may become part of us long before we understand its significance. Only years later do we begin to recognise its influence.

I sometimes wonder whether many of the themes that accompany us throughout life begin in this way. For each of us the details differ. The impressions do not.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that the organist on that record was Albert Schweitzer.

That discovery opened another door.

My interest in Schweitzer gradually grew. At the age of eighteen I attended an Albert Schweitzer symposium in Deventer while studying at the Primary School Teaching Academy in Amsterdam.

Later came medicine in Maastricht after an entry examination.

It was a change for the better.

Then came surgical, obstetric and emergency department training in St Antonius Hospital in Sneek.

And following this came Africa.

But before all of this, at the age of nineteen, came a promise made in the Maria Magdalena Kerk in Goes, my birthplace.

Against all odds, I promised that if I were privileged enough to study medicine, I would one day serve in Africa.

At the time the promise seemed entirely sincere and remarkably straightforward.

Life, however, had other ideas.

My own journey eventually took me through the Netherlands, South Africa, back to the Netherlands, then England, Scotland, Australia, South Africa again and eventually back to Australia.

At the time these appeared to be separate chapters.

Looking back, they seem more connected than I realised.

What strikes me now is how many of the things that stayed with me arrived through other people.

Jan Keesje was one.

Albert Schweitzer was another, although we never met.

At a similarly impressionable age, Robert F Kennedy became another influence. Looking back, I suspect it was not politics that attracted me. It was his instinct to stand beside people who were struggling, his refusal to become indifferent and his belief that society could be better than it was.

There were also teachers, mentors, colleagues, patients and friends whose influence far exceeded the length of the encounter.

At the time, few of them appeared to be shaping the direction of a life.

Only much later did I begin to recognise their influence.

What I remember most clearly, however, is not the geography.

It is the people.

Medicine itself gradually became less interesting as a collection of diseases and treatments and more interesting as a place from which to observe people.

Over time, I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the stories people carried with them, the disappointments they endured, the hopes they preserved and the remarkable variety of ways in which human beings respond to life.

The message about Gaza lingered longer than I expected.

Part of the reason, I suspect, was that it brought me back to a question that has accompanied me for much of my life.

Why do some lives unfold one way and others another?

Jan Keesje died at six.

I was allowed to grow up.

Many years later I was able to study medicine.

Others never receive that opportunity.

Some people spend their lives in relative safety.

Others are born into conflict, poverty, violence or displacement.

I have never found a completely satisfactory explanation for such differences.

As life evolves, I find myself less interested in explanations that merely rename a mystery and more interested in observing it carefully.

Medicine reinforced this repeatedly.

So did Africa.

So did life itself.

Again and again I encountered people whose courage exceeded their circumstances and others whose burdens seemed impossibly heavy.

The longer I worked with people, the less interested I became in judging their responses and the more interested I became in understanding them.

Human beings carry stories that are largely invisible to those around them.

Perhaps that is one reason why humility becomes increasingly important.

We rarely know as much about another person’s journey as we imagine.

Albert Schweitzer never answered these questions for me.

Neither did medicine.

Neither did Africa.

Yet Schweitzer’s idea of Reverence for Life remained.

Not as a doctrine.

Not as a philosophy to be defended.

More as a way of looking at people.

A reminder that every human life possesses a value that cannot be measured by success, failure, wealth, status or circumstance.

That observation has survived remarkably well.

So has the promise.

And so, it seems, have a few questions.

I still listen to the Bach recordings.

Africa still reappears from time to time.

The promise made in the Maria Magdalena Kerk remains part of the story.

And every now and then I find myself reflecting on a six-year-old boy who handed a record to a five-year-old friend without either of them having the faintest idea where life would eventually lead.

One died.

One lived.

Why?

I do not know.

After all these years, that mystery remains.

The music never left.