Out of My Life and Thought

"Schweitzer is an almost forgotten figure today, yet for much of the 20th century he was one of the most famous people in the Western world. He was born in 1875 in Alsace-Lorraine, and in his twenties he was a literary and intellectual superstar. He had PhDs in three subjects: in music, philosophy and theology. By his twenties he had written a two-volume biography of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach; a book on the quest for the historical Jesus; he was a professor of theology at the University of Strasbourg, and he was one of the world’s greatest organists to boot. Then at the age of 30 – and this is extraordinary in my view – Schweitzer decided to give all of that up, trained as a doctor and went to work in a leper hospital in the West African jungle. He later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his medical work there. His autobiography traces his transformation from his literary and intellectual work to the way he gave himself to human service. I think we learn two things from Schweitzer. The first is that it’s never too late to change your job, which is one of our great dilemmas. At The School of Life in London I teach a class called “How to find a job you love”. People are always saying, it’s too late to change my job as a banker or doctor or in PR. Schweitzer shows that you can change. When he was 30, he was revered, respected, he had status, yet he gave it all up and went into obscurity by retraining as a doctor. We live in an age where 60% of people want to change their job, but 25% of people are too afraid to make that change – many of them because they think it’s too late, that they can’t re-establish themselves. Schweitzer is telling us that we can. The second thing he’s telling us is that he put his political and ethical values into practice in his work. During his era it was actually quite difficult to find a job where you could express your beliefs. You may have believed in the trade union movement, but there weren’t that many jobs in it. Today, half a million jobs exist in the charity sector in Britain alone. So it’s even more realistic now to think, what are my core values and how can I express them in the work that I do? Because that’s one of the keys to finding fulfilling work. Absolutely. And he kept working as a doctor until the age of 90. He never really stopped. In fact, there’s a lot of contemporary research which shows that if you do a job that engages your ethics, it will give you more satisfaction than prioritising money or status. The way he described it, it sounds like a rather simplistic philosophy – to revere and protect every living thing. But where that really came from – in a way it links back to empathy – is he thought that if we experience suffering ourselves, we can understand the suffering of others, whether of humans rich or poor and animal life as well. He thought that out of that suffering which we experience ourselves, we can connect with others and create human bonds. That is what can empower a more ethical world. Reverence for Life is really an empathic concept in my view."