A winter storm just finished having its way with us, after bringing days of snow and cold that left streets icy and slippery. I'm cautious about driving in such conditions, so for the most part I didn't.

But this morning, after a warm front finally swept in and left the streets newly bare of snow, I headed up to St. Edwards Park for a much-needed walk in the woods. Few other walkers were on the trail, but I had plenty of company: a wren rustling through the forest litter; chickadees calling from the Indian plum trees along the lakeshore; a Douglas squirrel leaping with impossible grace from the trunk of a fir tree to an alder branch.

This regular walking loop leads down through tall cedars and firs to the lake, then along the lakeshore and back up. The last leg of the route winds up out of the cedar/fir forest into a grove of tall alders. As I entered the grove and breathed in the sweet, earthy alder scent--especially impactful because there had been very little to smell in the chilly forest below---my heart leapt with happiness.

With that happiness came a memory from when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. As a biology student, I needed to walk or ski about a mile back and forth each day from the main campus to a smaller cluster of buildings where lab classes were typically held. During the long, dark winter months, when temperatures were far, far below freezing, we students hustled back and forth, swaddled in layers of wool and down, with only our squinted eyes and frosted eyelashes visible.

In that season of intense cold and dark, the odors of earth and vegetation were completely absent. But by early spring, after the sun had slowly inched higher into the sky, there eventually came a day when the sunlight falling on aspen trunks along the trail had strengthened enough to cause sap to liquify and flow again. On that day each year, the first smell of that sap after the odorless winter made me instantly, headily, utterly drunk with the happiness of being alive.

Some Zen teachers use the term "skinbag" to refer to our bodies, their intention being to encourage us to drop our attachment to our bodies and our other transitory worldly preoccupations. I take their point, but I also celebrate the way that our bodies' senses connect us to so much: to our emotions, each other, the knowledge of our aliveness, the natural world that surrounds and sustains us. The first aspect of Buddhism's Eightfold Path is Wise View--the understanding that we are so inextricably connected to everyone and everything else that any sense that we are separate selves is an illusion to be seen through. Surely our skinbags can help us experience the truth of the connection that lies beneath the illusion.

A few days ago, CNN reported the firing of an animal shelter employee who had mistakenly euthanized Target, a dog who saved U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan from a suicide bomber. The employee was accused of not following procedures correctly. The name of that employee was not mentioned in the news report because--not unexpectedly--many threats had been made against them.

It is easy to assume that with diligence, a human being can avoid making errors. What naturally follows from that assumption is the belief that any error a person makes must represent a moral failure on his or her part. When someone makes an error that has grave consequences, as in this case, we can be especially harsh in our judgments of their action.

However, cognitive scientists have learned that this assumption is not accurate. Human beings cannot completely avoid making errors, because the mind by virtual of the way it operates is error-prone. Research done during the last few decades has revealed the kinds of errors most commonly made, the circumstances that can make errors more likely (e.g., a procedure that's confusing in some way for a person trying to follow it), even the differences between errors commonly made by experts vs. novices.

Professor James Reason's taxonomy of human errors, which I encountered in grad school, drove home these points for me, because it was so easy to see that I commonly make many of the errors described in his detailed taxonomy. Take, for example, the category of unintentional actions, which includes actions that don't proceed as planned. This category includes two main types of errors: slips and lapses. You make a slip when you pour cereal into your breakfast bowl, then absent-mindedly pour coffee onto the cereal instead of milk. I certainly do this now and then. You make a lapse when you set your briefcase or backpack by the door so you won't forget it, but then leave without it (I made this error last week).

Professor Reason includes a wide variety of other types of errors in his taxonomy, which is laid out in his book, "Human Error."

I don't know any of the details about what went wrong in the animal shelter, nor should I. I don't think that the fact that we necessarily make errors absolves us of all responsibility for our actions, because we know from experience that we can make fewer errors by being more careful. But it seems to me that Professor Reason's taxonomy should suggest to us that cutting each other slack, especially when all the facts aren't available to us, is a wise approach.