Combing Life for Bliss

Life, in my opinion, is like combing a beach. Mile after mile of sand stretches out before you, each next step an opportunity to uncover a treasure. Beautiful shells, sea glass, an old, rusted skeleton key, perhaps even a coin or lost jewelry might turn up. But all that is buried beneath the sand is not good. It is a risk, beach combing, for you never know when you may come upon a broken bottle, a sharp nail, trash or something equally undesirable. Sometimes you may spend the whole day, or even a series of days, searching the sands without a single thing to show for the work. It is in this aspect that I see life. Life stretches on in front of me, every new day an opportunity to discover something great. Sometimes I spend days, weeks, even years with apparently nothing to show for the work I've done. Other times life unearths tragedy, heartache, and sadness, much like a sharp, rusted can might cause pain while sifting through sand. But ultimately, whatever wound life caused is healed and the endless search continues until death. The best thing though, when combing a beach or when plodding along through life, is when you stumble upon a tiny treasure that was a complete surprise, a thing truly unlooked for.
Often the feeling that accompanies these moments in life is bliss, one of my favorite words. Bliss, by definition is complete happiness. Now happiness, unlike joy, is circumstantial meaning that blissful moments are fleeting, still shots from a full length motion picture. Blissful moments are fireflies, one second you see the delicate green glow light up a spot in the night, the next second the light has gone, moving on into deeper shade. But this uncertainty, the very rarity of bliss is part of its appeal. Blissful moments are sweetest because they are so infrequent, so unexpected. There are only a small handful of instants in my life that I can catalog as being characterized by bliss, a feeling so sweet and wonderful that you want to laugh, weep, and lose your breath all at the same time.
Just as combing a beach seems like endless work, life often seems like drudgery. When the minutes are added up it seems that there is so much precious time wasted on the mundane, years of life spent working at a job you hate, years of life down the drain sitting in traffic, doing laundry, even sleeping. There is nothing more perfect than something that breaks the monotony of life, even if it only lasts an instant, even if it is only the briefest of glimpses into bliss. Happiness made complete, if only for that infinitesimal fragment of time. Though they are short, it seems like these moments are clearest in my memory; as sharp and technicolor in my mind's eye as if they had just occured. And it is these tiny treasures, gathered from the endless shores of life that make all the searching worth it.