Patchett was speaking to graduates of her own alma mater, and the intimacy of returning shaped the entire speech. 'Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved,' she said. 'You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.' The metaphor of connected dots was paired with its opposite — the terror of looking forward without any dots at all. 'Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn't a bread crumb in sight — there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures.' The genius of the speech was this insistence that the pattern only becomes visible in retrospect — that you can't see it while you're living it.