Coming home from classes or work is the best part of the day. Responsibilities are hard and take up so much brain power, and most of the time, you aren’t allowed to eat food. That’s the worst part. Teachers hate it, and bosses don’t want to pay for the time.

As the days go by the stress just gets more intense, unless you have something to ease it away. For many people this release comes from going to bars or parties and drinking with friends. Others prefer a more quiet and relaxing time to de-stress. Some do both. Most will never turn down the opportunity to go on surreal adventures, like on a hike miles out in the middle of nowhere or scaling the 45-degree side of Half Dome. There is no wrong answer for finding your right zone and for placing yourself in an aura that fills your needs and makes you feel real again.

But it is not always required to go out into the wilderness or attend a social event to be with friends or to find someone to love. Sometimes it gets exhausting, or the mood isn’t quite there. Instead, perhaps you can pick a more subtle and relaxing method, one that doesn’t make you put in so much effort.

Perhaps it will enhance that aura more than any other experience ever could. Try digging through that bookshelf or exploring the depths of a used bookstore. As A. B. Curtiss wonderfully put it, “On rare occasions there comes along a profound original, an odd little book that comes out of nowhere, from the pen of an obscure storyteller, and once you have read it, you will never go completely back to where you were before.”

Some adventures are best experienced within your own mind. Characters that begin as fiction and end up becoming real enough to affect your life, just may be the type of friends you seek the most. They offer up the opportunity to follow along on journeys to incredible places, to hate their enemies and to love their families. Even as the reader, you have the chance to be a part of the story.

The only boundary is a closed mind, and if that is opened, everything else becomes a bridge. One leads to possibly the closest understanding you can get to another person without falling in love. Another leads you to people you’ve never met, but will teach you some of the most important lessons in your life. Others are climbs, which inspire levels of emotion you’ve never felt. Some will make you cry, and many will make you smile or even cry from joy in a mix of feelings you don’t yet understand. These bridges you see take you somewhere and you can never come back to. The best part, which you can’t get in real life, is the chance to walk across all of them, all at once.

A book can change your life, make you a better, kinder person, open your eyes and mind to objectivity. It can teach you lessons that nothing else is able to. You’d never know it just by flipping through the pages or taking a peek at the cover, but inside this wild and extraordinary piece of art and history, you may just find your best friend and make memories more significant than most. Maybe one day you’ll find someone who has read the same story, and it is the strongest shared connection that makes a lasting bond.

So when you come home from school or work, pick up a book. It may change your life.