The point is the process

This morning, we hunted for Easter eggs. The point of a hunt appears to be finding the brightly-colored eggs that older “kids” gleefully hide.

After today, I’m not so sure.

My kids are older now. Finding the eggs started out easy. The kids called out to each other as each candy-filled egg was found.

Then things grew quiet. How many were still missing? The kids added up the ones they’d found. Four left. Somewhere.

They kept looking.

Three left. Then two. Then one.

And no one could find it. Even the one who had hid them.

Some left to munch on the candy they’d gotten. Some wandered aimlessly, unsure what to do next. A few decided to keep looking, their candy forgotten.

And while all this was going on, kids were trading eggs, candy, and having a great time.

Finding the eggs was the point…and yet, it wasn’t. Finding eggs was the goal, but the point was the process of finding them.

There’s a lot of things we want to find in life. Sometimes we’ll get more or less than what we were hoping to find. Sometimes we’ll find the things we worked so hard for don’t matter as much as we thought. Sometimes that knowledge makes us think we made a mistake in working as hard as we did.

But the point is the process. I think, as long as we keep that in mind, we’ll always have a way to find joy.

*goes back to looking for that last Easter egg*

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