Blue moments

I was 25 penniless, alone, frightened and ill. I was living in a garret. Ihad no friends and I was far from family. My days were spentworking in an antique resotration shop of an embittered alcoholic man, and my nights were spent wandering the streets watching the oassinglives of people who neither spoke my language nor knew of my cares.
I had never been so alone.

The mother of the man for whom Iworked was a very insightful woman. As a child, she had watched the Nazis comeinto her classroom and take the Jewish children away. No one spoken of it and class went on as if nothing had happened. But day by day, night by night,she saw her friends and playmates disappear.

She became a watcher and survivor.

One day she took me inside.
"I watch you," she said. "I see the loneliness in your eyes. I watch your heart running away. You are like so many people. When life is hard, they try to look over the difficulty into the future. Or they long for the happiness of the past. Time is their enemy.The day they are lving is their enemy. They are dead to the moment. They live only for the future or the past. But that is wrong.

"You must learn to seek the blue moment," she said.

She sat down beside me and continued. "The blue moment can happen any time or any place. It is a moment when you are truly alive to the world around you. It can be a moment of love or a moment of terror. You may not know it when it happens. It may only reveal itself in memory. But if you are patient and open your heart, the blue moment will come. My childhood classmates are dead, but I have the blue moments when we looked in each other's eyes"

I turned and stared into her lined and gentle face.

"Listen carefully to me," she continued."This is a blue moment. I really believe it. We will never forget it. At this moment you and I are closer to any other human beings. Seize this moment. Hold it. Don't turn fromit. It will pass andwewill be as we were. But this is a blue moment,and the blue moments string us together like pearls to make up your life. It is up to you to find them. It is upto you to bring them alive in others."

"Always seek the blue moment," she said, and returned to her work.


(Taken from Small Graces - the quiet gifts of everyday life, by Ken Nerburn)