There are a few books I return to regularly, reading them cover to cover every few years because they feed my soul. They bring me joy, the opportunity for deep reflection, or reminders of what’s important. They feel like a part of my family.

In the world of fiction, those books include Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (the subject of my college honor’s thesis), Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. There are others, a list too long to offer here.

In the works of my professional world, one book I return to is The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. A mediation student of mine gave it to me several years ago and I’ve just finished another pass through it. It’s one of those books that makes the sun shine brighter.

The Art of Possibility is a book about finding possibility in the face of difficulty. But it’s more than that. It’s about framing a life based on possibility. The first time I ever read it, I knew from the first paragraph that I was about to step into something different than other self-help books:

Unlike the genre of how-to books that offer strategies to surmount the hurdles of a competitive world and move out ahead, the objective of this book is to provide the reader the means to lift off from that world of struggle and sail into a vast universe of possibility.

I’ve followed in my student’s footsteps, giving this book as a gift again and again. It’s a read worth sharing with others we care about.