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"So much of my day-to-day struggle is battling against The Clock,” Norman, a physician tells me. “And by that I mean being told what to do, when to do it, how long I have, and even how to do it. There’s so little time to just be.”

Once the kids are in bed, he gets to do what he wants. Finally.

He can scroll on his phone, waste time any way he wants.

It’s a sort of rebellion against having so little autonomy over the rest of his day.

1. How he’d tell me a 6-hour night was a “good” night of sleep.

2. Or that he wasn’t tired, then falling asleep at the kids’ plays.

3. Never going to sleep or waking up together.

I have always hated swimming in cold water.

I am a strong swimmer, thanks to my mother, who never learned to swim, requiring that I take swimming lessons through Junior Life Savers.

But I was always freezing cold.

A little girl without body fat, my knees knocked, my teeth chattered as I sat hunched beneath my tiny no-nonsense towel on foggy Bay Area mornings to get into an unheated pool.

It became part of my identity: “I’m not a cold-water girl.”

I was a strong swimming who didn't really love the water.

But recently that story changed.

Wearing my red bathing suit, I waded into the Mediterranean Sea.

“Ever since I began praying before I go into each patient’s room,” Sanjana Tasneem Karim, MD told me, “I have not suffered from burnout.”

Did Karim really have to magic pill for physician burnout which, according to several studies, is at an all-time high?

I circle back to talk with the Georgetown-trained psychiatrist to find out.

She is Muslim. I am not affiliated with any religion, but carry the spirit of many. She is 21. I am 60. She is African. I am American. She is black. I am white.

Maimouna Diop and I met through LinkedIn. Or, more accurately, LinkedIn was the vehicle through which we connected.

Over thousands of miles, time zones, continents, oceans, cultures, a little voice told her that life coaching might be the answer for her troubles.

Her friends thought I might be trying to scam her. Why, they asked, would you want to tell this white lady across the world about your life?

For my part, I wondered, Why would this young woman — not a physician — from the west coast of Africa want to hire me as a life coach?

It turns out that everyone yearns, as some point in their lives, to transform, to be more, to lift up toward the light, to be their highest and best self.

I did not know what a “spirit animal” was in 1979.

And if I did, I would have scoffed at the very idea.

Even though I grew up in Berkeley, Calif., arguably the birth place of woo-woo, I was also raised to be a skeptic.

But sometimes you don’t know what you need until it’s right in front of you.

It turns out I needed a spirit animal that day.

I was 17, alone in the Sierra Nevada wilderness, my weight hovering around 100 pounds.

I hadn’t eaten in two days. I had one more to go.

The first time my doctor-husband counted a large sum of cash into my hand, it was thrilling. Intoxicating.

In my family of origin, everything was measured out — money and love.

So when he handed me piles of cash, I felt loved. I felt cared for. I felt safe.

I also felt sick. I was becoming an accomplice — to what exactly, I wasn’t yet sure.

Workaholism is a sneaky foe, especially in medicine.

It was a weeknight.

I now know, Basem Goueli MD/PhD/MBA had already been working countless hours by the time a hesitantly reached out on LinkedIn.

“How much do you know about Hemochromatosis?" I messaged, referring to a genetic blood disorder that I’ve been managing for more than a decade.

“How can I help?” came the hematologist/oncologist’s immediate response.

Over the next few days I sent him charts of lab results and levels, as he requested.

I am often asked, "Why do you coach doctors?"

The short answer is almost too easy and doesn't really tell the story: I was married to one for 24 years.

The marriage did not work out, though we are great friends and consider each other family to this day.

Many marriages don't work out, but in our case and in many ways, medicine killed our marriage.

It was the mistress from the moment he came home not smelling of another woman's perfume, but of formaldehyde from anatomy class.

What goes around comes around. Sometimes even in a single day.

The day started with coach Theresa Callahan to share our coaching tools with each other. It was my turn to receive.

It was a tune-up of sorts, something we all need from time to time.

I walked away from the session with a name for my Pleaser saboteur, and box to leave her B.S. in when it's time to gather my superpowers and do what I am really here to do: Touch the souls of those with whom I cross paths so we can all vibrate at the highest level.

I knew I'd have an opportunity to pay that gift forward. But I didn't think it would be so soon.

I used to date as though my life depended on it.

Sometimes I went on several dates a week.

I’d get dressed up, but not too. I’d put on make-up, but not too much.

I’d try to look like myself, but not too much.

“Too much” was the moving bar I tried to stay below.

his is one of many people who take care of my mom in memory care. His name is Evans.

Don’t even think about being sad around him. He has a laugh that will shake you right out of it.

It is the sound of mischief and play.

The sound of it rings out in this mostly silent community of people who've mostly lost their voices, their connections, their memories.

Evans’ laugh comes from his soul, maybe from his childhood long ago in Kenya. But also from where he is in each moment: with our mothers and fathers, and with those of us who still remember what our mothers and fathers were like before Alzheimer’s.

When I married my husband, I had no idea that one day there would be a mistress.

When I met the man who would become my husband, he was not yet a doctor. He was 22, a black belt, a waiter in a fancy restaurant and very handsome. He knew all kinds of things about champagne and paté, cocktails and sushi.

We met in our college martial arts club. I was 19, and on fire with a newfound power of using my body to make fierce poetry with my hands and feet. He was drawn to that.

I was smitten with his kicks; his cool mix of fighting skills and culinary sophistication.

He was a bit of a bad boy with great potential. He was still on the cusp of choosing a direction for his life, wavering between culinary school and medical school.

I told myself I didn’t care what he did, as long as he was happy.

But looking back, I had secretly hoped he’d pick medicine — and that medicine would pick him.

In her small room, my mom is wrapped as tightly as a burrito in her light summer blankets.

I know she likes this. She is swaddled.

I sit on the side of her, while Nick, a music therapist with Moments Hospice sings to her. He sings to us, really, because I make sure I am there to receive this sound with my mom.

"Music therapy is clinical and evidence-base use of music intervention," says Jennifer Hicks, a music therapist, who was part of today's Wellness Wednesday, a Minnesota Public Radio podcast, hosted by Angela Davis.

It connects Mom and I, over years and lifetimes.

"Because work was the problem," says Dominic Corrigan MD, founder of Physicians Anonymous, "What did I do? I just worked harder -- until I just hit a point where I could no longer work."

My client, “Sam”, works all the time. He falls asleep with his charts.

My other client, “Bill”, starts working on his charts, but then thinks, “I’ll just book this flight. And then I’ll get caught up on my laundry.” It’s hours later and he hasn’t finished his charts and he feels like he got hijacked and accomplished nothing.

As soon as I tasted the grace and power of Tae Kwon Do, I was in love.

The conditioning was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

We ran in circles. Then -- quick change -- the other way.

We ran backwards.

We skipped. We hopped.

We jumped, knees to chest, 100 times.

I am trying to diagnose my Mother Tongue plant’s illness the other day, when my client arrives for his session.

It is a big plant comprised of a jungle of vibrant knife-like fronds and some other drooping ones that are causing my concern.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asks.

An orthopedic surgeon, he fixes knees and shoulders very well.

But plants are a complete mystery to him.

“See how droopy it is?” I ask. “It wasn’t like this before.”

“Hmm,” he says.

His mother, like mine, is dying. He has bigger fish to fry than my plant.

Today I read poetry to my mother.

I find her tucked up nicely in her bed. She sleeps much of the times these days.

I run both my hands down her shoulders and arms swaddled in light covers, saying softly, “Hi, Mom.”

Even if she no longer knows me in the way I know my children, on this linear plane of time and space, I like to believe that when she hears “Mom” in my voice, the word wends its way into a room of her soul where words like Mom and Dad, Daughter and Son live beyond Alzheimer’s in timeless storage.

I sit beside my mother in her close room, the shades drawn against the August heat in Minneapolis. Outside, I know the lake is glistening. Birds are resting.

She is comfortably reclined in her Cadillac of a wheel chair that she got as soon as she began losing enough weight to trigger hospice care.

She is wisp of her former body. Light as a feather.

When I was a young girl, I used to sit beside her while she read

I’ve done some weird things in my life.

How weird?

Boundary-pushing, assumption-challenging weird.