Two years ago, I was living in an apartment in the basement of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was working in private practice as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and spending most of my weekends driving two hours both ways to upstate New York to do something in the outdoors. I was tired and burnt out and when a relationship I had been in ended, I needed a change. Little did I know that the catalyst for that change would be my seven-year-old black Labrador, Goose.