With Easter here I’m thinking about hidden gifts.

Hidden things, like Easter eggs and Easter baskets when I was a child. I never thought about why the Easter Bunny hid our baskets, or why we went to so much effort to hide our beautifully dyed eggs in Central Park and then went on “Easter Egg Hunts” to find them.

In those days the only eggs I knew about were birds eggs or dinosaur eggs, and possibly fish eggs and insect eggs. Never mind about those hidden gifts of the female human kind that Nature would bestow on me after puberty.

But aside from eggs and Easter, we have many other gifts we might have to search for in order to find them, being that they can often appear as a disability or a loss, a negative rather than a positive.

Six years ago I didn’t see going deaf in one ear as a gift, at least not right away. Aside from the loss of hearing, there was an excruciating vertigo. But after that was taken care of and my balance improved, I found the gift. The gift of hearing with love. Whatever it was, I would hear it with love. And so my life-long battle with noise was over at last!

We live in a time when schools have “gifted and talented” programs and those places are much sought after. Also sought after are places on television talent shows. And so we tend to divide ourselves into “gifted people” and “regular people,” even though we’re all supposed to be special in our own unique and wonderful ways. (And we are, of course!)

My own take on the situation, as one who has been called “gifted,” is this. We all had the opportunity to “shop” in the “Gift Store” before we came into physical incarnation. Whether we remember this experience consciously or unconsciously doesn’t matter, as long as somewhere inside we can accept that these were the gifts that were chosen by us to be used in the lives we would lead.

Yet to my way of thinking, it is the gift behind the gift that has been the true present.

The hidden gift behind being able to draw is the gift of seeing beyond the surface of things.

The hidden gift behind being an actor is the gift of being able to study human character and have the experience of living inside other people for a time.

The hidden gift of writing is the gift of being able to organize one’s thoughts and communicate them to others.

I treasure my hidden gifts.

Do you have any hidden gifts you would like to share?