One of those quirky genes.

I am certain, someday, Science will discover its existence and give whoops and high-fives.

Life plays out an equal measure of tragedies and parodies for everyone. I am not of those whinnies who complain being burdened with more than my share.

Life meets us all on equal terms, gravelling our paths with sharpnel, smoothening our orbits with redemption. Our individual trajectories may differ, but mapped in the bigger graph - a picture so vast and complex we often have no clue how or where to start reading it - the algorithms resonate similar patterns. Life favours no one. Nature posits itself in equilibrium. In summation, the portions of its cruelties and benefactions are a level terrain.

We are each of us given chances at revision, multiple opportunities, at deconstruction, adaptation, mitigation. Many different alternatives at finding purposefulness and peace.

It never returns to idyllic, no. Life is a one-way canal. Unidirectional flow like sunlight. Which is why it is never monotonous, rather precious and full of possibilities. Which is also why it can be useful but never painless.

We get only a stab at repair, not one to be unbroken again.

In the end what decides our resilience to survive?

Why do some minds come unhinged? Why do some of us grope at straw and others at the noose? Why some of us fear going blind in the sun, shut our lids, turn our faces while others keep searching for that one beam of visibility in the black horizon?

How can some of us stand eye-to-eye with our demons, never release our grips, even when our brain registers better sense in being done with the farce?

What makes us survivors?

What urges us to fight our own pain, delusion, disappointment, heartbreak?

What keeps us breathing, one low, nerve wrecking, heart bleeding pace at a time, when all that stops us from oblivion is the physical act of that next inhalation?

In the end, why do some of us choose to be happy?

Oh yes, it is a choice. How our brains work, which experiences we allow to govern our thoughts, which epiphanies we pick as life lessons, wherefrom in our inner beings do we get these signals?

Why some of us can only see the many reasons for unhappiness? Why some of us are happy, without apparent reason, after a series of lost hands?

If physics and chemistry define the biology of our existence, there has got to be a tangible protein for this kind of causality, an inbuilt physical site where positive attitudes are manufactured. Something that commands our idiotic mirth, makes depressions appear short spans interrupted by longer lasting equitability.

There must be a gene responsible for happiness. For optimism. For laughter. For the foolhardy willingness to go blind gazing into sunshine. Despite Life pointing all its signpostings into the darkness and the many trekkers crowding that trail. Like some of us are born with green eyes, or black or blue, some of us with red hair, or yellow or brown, some of us with brittle bones or blood, some are programmed to remain naive and earnest.