A microscope allows you to look at a single hair on the hairy nucleus of a hairy cell. This isn’t an evidence-based scientific fact, but a joke. Stay with the joke, and let your imagination zoom in on that squiggly hair, which looks “plucked,” to use an evidence-based word. I forgot to tell you that the cell comes from the root end of the tail of an Asian elephant, male, roughly 48 years old and as big as a New York City fatberg. You’re familiar with the fatberg: an enormous blob of congealed fat clogging the city sewers. I’m not making it up. The London Whitechapel Fatberg was 250 meters long and weighed 130 tons, the equivalent of 13 trillion human hairs.

How much information can you gather about that particular elephant by looking closely at the squiggly strand of nothing, plucked from you-know-where and very close to the you-know-what?

Zooming in is a useful skill, both for evidence-based minds (scientists) and evidence-denial minds (artists). Cell biology saves lives. Pluck the right hair, the precise one, the one out of 13 trillion, and the fatberg automatically deflates, allowing New Yorkers to sleep in peace, if they ever go to sleep. By the way, the scientists-versus-artists remark is gratuitous, and not supported by the evidence.

I’m not against fatberg deflation. But I think zooming in risks making you blind to the elephant, that living, breathing sentient being with incredible intelligence, creativity, social skills, and much more. The elephant, big; the elephant and his family, very big and wonderful; the elephant and his herd, gigantic and fascinating; the elephant and his herd, his history, his country, his continent, his universe, the Universe. There: we’ve just zoomed out, and the squiggly gossamer wisp doesn’t concern us anymore. We’re ready to apologize to the elephant for the fatberg joke.

Zooming out gives us astronomy, galaxies, planets, stars, the seasons, tides, and an infinity of unanswerable questions. Zooming out gives us context: the relationship between a thing and all other things. Zooming out gives us perspective and distance, both literal and psychological. When I zoom out of one of my worries, I gain perspective and distance. I see my worry differently. My worry might even disappear (up the rear end of the fatberg, of course).

Zooming in and zooming out are opposing forces, forever playing together and feeding each other. Good health is the balance of zooms, so to speak. You achieve it when you become adept at zooming in, adept at zooming out, adept at passing from one to the other, and adept at navigating their risks and integrating their strengths.

As I write, an oppressive heatwave is overpowering France and frying the brains of every French person, including dual nationals with French and Brazilian citizenship. When the weather is mild, the breeze fresh, and the night cozy, I don’t think that much about fatbergs. With any luck my next blog post will be more evidence-based.