Complicated emotion is living
Happiness is having things that you want to do, and that you can do. The heightened appreciation for the wholeness/vastness of everything and the intricate microscopic abyss of all the things that make up the wholeness. And just think if we hadn't created so many crazy word-relationship meanings for our languages how lost in translation our over-expanding mind thoughts would be that we couldn't communicate with others? Maybe that is why in our childhood minds we could create such 'imaginary friends' and fantasy worlds that only we were on the same channel with/same wavelength. Only your 'thought up' friend actually got it. And then we all grew up a bit and expanded our vocabulary and communicated only our likeness with other people instead of our created differences. Before we knew what the feeling of embarrassment was and how much we didn't like the way it felt. Consumed by negative emotions. Before we lived so little that we didn't know what they felt like. When we just were praised, when we just followed our parents standards, our peers standards or rebel-unstandards. Adults still do it too, a lot of us. De-living and just following the pack. Don't get this confused with those that appear to 'live' a lot just for the sole purpose of being 'famous', being known. That need for recognition, that may be living, but it is a less-satisfactual avenue to take. Happiness dependent on others or material things or drugs; Anything/anyone. That is a very sad form of happy to take. At least in my opinion. Other things/people should create an ever-changing balance to you and your likes and dislikes. Taking that crisp/clean cut definition of YOU and abstracting it slightly, so it becomes a different and more intricately beautiful you. Like a snowflake. Like a hypotrochoid. Finding what you forever love is first finding something in which the possibilities are endless (like evolution). Then it is finding that which is the most fantastically exciting endless possibilities... the ones that are the most intricately abstracted with elaborate feelings which intertwine with our experiences positively or negatively which create that lasting connectedness with. Because isn't that the more primal/basic instinct of "love" just being connected? You can like things, a lot, that you are not connected with. But you can't love them. Time and intensity and roots (in emotion). Bring love. If someone doesn't change, are they happy? If we all change, can we rarely find someone we are happy with forever. You can love them forever, but are you happy with them forever. Are you as mesmerized by them as you are with nature? Living simply is more predetermined fate by nature. Living complicated is more our choices determining. Maybe we are just bubbles floating on the wind bumping into each other, or maybe it's more than that, it's a whole lot more than that. What do you believe? How does your mind wander? Or does it? How do things work and why do they happen. Explain a rainbow. Okay now a rock. Okay, now you. Living is also finding out the truth, not the truth in lies, but in the unknown.
I don't see life as a finish line.