I love to start off these short, dark days by walking my six-year-old mini-poodle, Oliver, to the cloistered inner patch of green at Instituto Cervantes in Turtle Bay, Manhattan. Oliver dashes around in the dead leaves and brush in search of chewables, and I do the first third of the short form, ideally three times. Soon Oliver is chewing  on a stick and luxuriating in the smells only he is privy to, while I try to balance and move “without doing.”  Somehow there is a correspondence between the two of us during those moments that reassures me.