with Carlos Antonio Leonardia

The most common definition of an Easter egg is the one that is most known by young children, the  colorful ones that they hunt down with a vengeance on Easter Sundays.  It could be hand painted hardboiled chicken egg, or tiny chocolate eggs, or those little plastic eggs that come with all sorts of goodies inside, and it could even be something that does not look anything like an egg, but its eggness doesn’t really matter and as long as it is part of the Easter egg hunt, children will turn the garden upside down looking for it.

When I was young enough to enjoy those hunts, the main goal would have been to be the kid to find the grand prize, a giant chocolate egg hidden somewhere in the garden, a little bit harder to find than all the other regular eggs and prizes.  Another thing that I realized then that I was often more content with the tiny chocolate eggs rather than those colorful hardboiled ones, even if it was the latter that scored bigger points when it came to figuring out who the best egg hunter of the day was.  After all chocolates, even if they were smaller than the hardboiled eggs, tasted better and lasted longer.  But the thing with Easter egg hunts was that when it comes to hunting, kids didn’t discriminate, what was ultimately important was trying to find as many as you can before time ran out. 

After I outgrew Easter egg hunts, and moved on to computer games, my definition of an easter egg changed from that annual juvenile activity to those little surprises hidden by the developers in the software.  Most computer games had easter eggs hidden deep inside the game, activated by secret keystrokes or special circumstances within the games which when discovered give players special powers or weapons, access to secret levels, or allow little games within the game to be played. 

Easter eggs were not limited to computer games, as one of the more famous easter eggs was planted by developers in Microsoft Excel, which when activated allowed the user to play a simple flight simulator game.

Now that I’m a little bit older with kids of my own, I have realized that Easter eggs are not limited to Sundays after the Resurrection and computer games, but can actually be found everywhere, especially if you start looking at all of life’s little surprises as such.  An unexpected hug from a loved one, your kid’s smile, bumping into a long lost friend at the coffee shop, a free lunch, even a shorter than usual line at the grocery or the bank can all be considered as easter eggs and if we think of it that way, then everyday can be as blessed as Easter Sunday.

Come to think of it, if it is the thrill of the hunt that’s what makes hunting Easter eggs fun, both in the garden and in computer games, as there is nothing more satisfying than looking fervently for something, looking under every rock and flowerpot, and then finally finding it, then we can bring back the excitement of hunting for Easter eggs by treating every day as a never ending Easter egg hunt.  For those of us who look at life as one boring day after another, it does not have to be so tediously monotonous anymore if we can be childlike in this aspect.  Of course unlike the simple games that children play where everything is cut and dried, life can be a little bit more complicated and unpredictable and there is no way of telling if we can actually find what we are looking for, and oftentimes we may not get what we thought we wanted.  That disappointment often clouds the fact that a lot of the time even if we didn’t get the giant chocolate egg we were searching high and low for, none of us would have gone home completely empty handed and a gaily painted hardboiled egg couldn’t have been that bad.

Ideally, all of us should have gained something from this year’s Holy Week.  Maybe the pious and prayerful who will be celebrating what should be the most important day of the Christian calendar after wrapping up 40 days of fasting, abstinence, reflection and prayer come out of the season with their souls refreshed; and the vacationers who have taken advantage of the extra long weekend start to make their way back home with their bodies and minds rested; and for those of us who did neither, we can always learn from those silly games that has nothing to do with the resurrection of our savior that children will be playing to help us look at life with a little more optimism than before.

Happy Easter everybody.