Quoting Rebecca Solnit's 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost,' Heidt urged the graduates not to fear having their lives unfigured. She combined Solnit's wisdom with Rilke's famous advice from 'Letters to a Young Poet': 'Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.' She shared her own experience of being 'off the narrative' at age 26 — single, childless, in graduate school while classmates reported on weddings and babies — and realizing there isn't a secret storyline to follow. Instead, the figuring out, the working out, and the growing are nothing short of living itself. Virginia Woolf provided her final touchstone: 'The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations struck unexpectedly in the dark.'