Several years ago my life was on cruise control, and I was just skimmin' along. I had always secured the jobs I wanted when I wanted them. I was a public school administrator and had climbed the ladder of success to the good life. I was making six figures.

My son and daughter were grown, through college, married, and living happy lives of their own. All of these outward signs masked the fact that on the inside my life was falling apart around me. I was a lost soul. I couldn't eat; I couldn't sleep; I lost my ability to focus. I would read a paragraph in a newspaper article and not remember what I had just read.

I spent the hour-long commute to my job looking at cement mixers and eighteen wheelers, thinking if I would just veer the steering wheel a little to the left, leave off my seat belt, and pick up speed, there was no way I would survive the crash. These thoughts began to occupy more and more of my thinking. I didn't know why, but I became very scared.

After a short period of time spent entertaining these thoughts, and after several visits to various doctors, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, and the depression had been coming on for a long, long time. I had ignored the signals and signposts along the way that gave me clues. The last person in the world I would have thought would become depressed was me. I spent the next four months as a patient in a psychiatric care unit of a local hospital.

Lessons from the Porch was written for those who want to better understand their life journeys; those who have unanswered questions about meaning for their life; and those who want to go back, bring questions to the surface and fill in some of the gaps.

Twenty-two unique, but transferable lessons are presented as stories of a personal, professional, and spiritual journey - stories that are intended to nudge readers to bring to the surface those questions and lessons about their own lives and their own journeys.