One thing I realized on the subte ride home after working out in a local park with a small group of people Thursday evening is that life is a series of clickable moments — or moments that click.

It seems obvious, but I honestly hadn’t thought of life in this way until now. And it’s an epiphany I’m having as a result of making this international leap to Buenos Aires.

You see, when I moved down here, I knew it would be challenging, but I think I thought there’d be a day, a week, a month when everything just clicked — when everything seemingly fell into place in a moment. More or less.

It sounds absurd to write that because it is absurd. There’s no single moment when everything clicks into place. Never. Moving and adjusting to a new place and building a home in that new place is series of moments where something clicks. Little or big. They all contribute to a greater whole.

I had the same misconception about learning a new language, and a few weeks ago, when I told someone I’m waiting for the moment when everything clicks, when Spanish really makes sense, he corrected me with exactly this idea. There will not be one moment. There will not two, three or even ten moments. There will be many. More than I know.

At the time, we were only talking about language, but I can now see that’s true for this move as a whole — and more than that, it’s true for life. Life is a series of clickable moments.

Can you imagine if we were living for one clickable moment, the moment when everything just clicked together in our lives? Crazy, right? What would be the point in carrying on after that? Life — like moving and learning a new language — is a challenge. It’s full of struggle as well as clickable and often learnable moments, and that’s what makes it so exciting, so beautiful, so worth living.

I was listening to a podcast the other morning with Steph Jagger, and she was talking about this as well. She talked about how the starting line is often more important, more significant than the finish line. She talked about the fact that our journeys, and the little moments that comprise them, are where we experience, learn and grow the most.

And to push it to an extreme thought — because my mind traveled here as I was listening to Steph — what are we going to learn from the finish line of our lives? Life and living are not about that. Life is about what we do and how we learn and grow along the way. Life is about living through the struggle and delighting in the moments that click.

So moving forward, in this move, in learning a new language and in life, rather than searching for that one clickable moment — it doesn’t exist nor would I want it to — I’m searching for all the magical moments where something clicks for me. The moments that are making this journey challenging and worthy all at once — and ultimately contributing to the greater story that is my life.

January 7, 2017