I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost in one day. I picked up the book and started reading at work. The next thing I knew it was lunchtime and I had already read half of it (something I could do because my boss was serving jury duty that day.) I finished it that night.

Solnit posits a rough hypothesis in the first essay that I figured would guide me through the eight other essays. She asks the reader to broadly conceptualize the idea of getting lost or being lost as “not knowing” – not knowing where you are, not knowing where to go, not knowing what you don’t know. For Solnit this concept struck her when a student shared with her a quote from Plato’s Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?" I finished this first essay excited about the exploration of this central theme. How can we ever come to know what we don’t know? As one who studied philosophy in college and who has analyzed Meno, I felt eager and prepared to accompany Solnit with her field guide. The last line of the first essay is a reassuring send-off: “What follows are a few of my own maps.”

However, I quickly realized that there seemed to be only the slightest thread of continuity connecting each of Solnit’s essays to a central theme. The essays span such broad subjects as art and cultural history, personal introspection, family heritage, philosophical quandary, love, and death. Often times I wondered why she was telling me some detail or sharing a particular story in her essays. As much as I was taking in the words written on the page, I was also negotiating an unavoidable internal monologue sparked by these words. I didn’t know what to think or where the essays were going or what it all meant.

I was lost. And that was the point.

Reading the entire book in just one day (which is neither typical nor easy for me) was inevitable. I was convinced that the only way to be found was to keep reading. That all too familiar panic from being lost (think about getting separated from your mom at the grocery store when you were a small child) was pervasive and I just wanted to be found. I thought: The next page would have all the answers, okay the next page, okay the next. And: Well, I’m still really lost so I better read the next essay so I can be found. I had to keep turning the page to keep searching for answers or, at least, some sort of map. But the book ended. And only then could the “a-ha” moment strike. And it did: the “thread of continuity” that I thought was lacking and what made me feel lost was actually just that – being lost. Solnit’s book is meant to be an exercise in getting lost.

So did Solnit improperly name her book? Should it be titled An Exercise in Getting Lost? If her book were actually a field guide, shouldn’t it cause the reader to feel less lost and more found? Maybe. But what good is a field guide without the field? (Not to get too meta, but is the Field Guide to Southern African Wildlife that sits on my bookshelf at home actually a field guide when it’s not being used to inform an otherwise ignorant person while on safari in South Africa, while in the field?) Such is precisely the brilliance of Rebecca Solnit – in A Field Guide to Getting Lost she provides the reader both the field guide and the field. She gets her readers lost, while simultaneously equipping them with what it means to be lost and so how one might be found.

My dad gave me Solnit’s book for Christmas. The intention behind his gifting this particular book was not lost on me. (Sorry Dad, but the timing was a bit cliché.) Here I am, a twenty-something living on my own and working an office job completely unrelated to my undergraduate degree and the master’s degree I took an extra year to earn (because what else was I supposed to do!?). I’m trying to navigate my life to be authentic and meaningful and fulfilling without knowing what that life really looks like for me. Cue the Millennial chorus.

And then cue Solnit’s original concept of being lost as not knowing – “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?”

Upon finishing A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I didn’t feel found. The answer that I thought was on the next page and the next was never actually there. The pervasive, where-is-my-mom-panic was not hushed by any grand conclusion from Solnit. And having read the last of her essays in the book didn’t mean that I had found my way out of the forest that was my racing mind. The book ended abruptly and I was still “out there” not knowing where I was and where I was going. I was still lost.

Only when I realized that finishing the book was not synonymous with being found did A Field Guide to Getting Lost actually become a field guide for me. Solnit stresses that so much about being lost or found can be contributed to one’s personal transformation in the situations that one finds herself. She tells the stories of Native Americans who were captured by European explorers. These natives were no longer lost not when they were returned – because usually they never were – but when they became someone new living among their captors. So much about being lost then found is about accepting change.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is not meant to be a lesson in how to be found. Rather Solnit, through her seemingly random stories, shows the reader what loss and being lost can look like and the potential beauty of it. Being lost safely between the two covers of Solnit’s book allows the reader to reflect on all the good that can come from being lost, all that one might find unexpectedly only because she was lost in the first place.

My life currently is not characterized by the pursuit of some defined path or by knowing exactly what I want in five years or even in five months. Yet everyone, and not just my fellow emerging adults of the Millennial generation, must live under the confines of not knowing what exactly the future holds. There is a comfort in accepting this reality: the task of “finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you” becomes not the impossible task of finding some specific thing or path, but rather the beauty of fielding whatever comes and adapting your way into being found.

When you’re lost, all you can really know is that you are. But to know this is to be open to all the ways that you might be found.