Climbers often position their free hanging foot in the opposite direction that they’re reaching to maintain balance on the wall. This maneuver is called flagging, and it’s an essential technique for every climber. Flagging works by keeping a climber’s center of gravity over their foothold — the free hanging foot counterbalances the reaching hand. Put another way, before climbers move in the direction they want to travel, they often move in the opposite direction first.
Concepts of balance are pervasive in our discussions about how to live healthy and happy lives. There’s the mystical ‘work-life balance’ and the equally difficult to discover ‘balanced diet.’ For the past two years, we’ve been debating how to balance individual rights and the collective good during a global respiratory pandemic. I often find these concepts of balance lacking because they frequently assume balance functions like an antique set of merchant scales. That if you sprinkle in just the right amount of work, ice cream, or pandemic restrictions, you’ll have found the magical formula for happiness or a functioning society.
But this concept of balance is too static.
The balance that we use to walk, ride a bike, or climb a hulking piece of rock is dynamic. We make constant adjustments to our environment, and we sometimes move backwards before we move forwards or push away the direction we intend to go. My ideas about balance are admittedly not my own. They come from a former (and favorite) college professor of mine who likened work-life balance to unicycling, and the idea — like many of his ideas — has stuck in my mind ever since. Paul once wrote:
“Unicycle riders have tremendous balance, but it’s a balance that’s always in motion, always cycling from one extreme to another. When they are ‘standing still,’ they are rocking forward, then backward, then forward, cycling between extremes, always moving, always changing, always adapting. It’s a far better image than scales because it shows how balance is dynamic, not static. I learned I have to be 100 percent loyal to work and extreme in my commitment to it; then I can turn around and be 100 percent loyal to my family, completely dedicated to it, not distracted and not worried about work in the slightest. I push the cycle all the way forward precisely so that I can push it all the way backward.”
We live in a flood of data, information, and potentially innovative technologies. The Wellcome Sanger Institute sequenced the same number of DNA bases in 2019 that it had sequenced in the previous twenty-five years combined, and that was before it became the centralized sequencing hub for the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 surveillance efforts. Scientific research output has grown tremendously in the past few decades, and the number of patents granted in the United States has nearly doubled since 2000. In this type of environment, our understanding of how to live well can always be moving, changing, adapting, and we can easily be swept away in the flood.
Counterbalance is about applying a dynamic approach to our examination of the ideas and systems that help or hinder us in our quest to live a good life. I want to explore how we can integrate new information with old(er) ideas to keep us upright in our hectic lives and to understand how we can effectively identify those moments at the extremes where we must tip our approach back in the other direction else, we fall completely.
So… Who am I?
I’m Andrew. I’m a proud Hokie (Hokie Hokie Hokie Hy / Tech Tech VPI!), and I’ve spent the past two years studying health data science and genomic medicine at UCL and the University of Cambridge, respectively. When I finish up my time in Cambs, I’ll start medical school at Penn. Obviously, that’s a lot of school (as my loving family and friends like to remind me) and spending so much time in an academic environment does influence what I think about. Some of the Big Questions™ that inspire me include how we can use ‘Big Data’ to develop deeper understandings of the biological and social factors that affect our health, how we should structure our public institutions and policies to support health and happiness, and how we navigate our world in a way that both engages with its complexities while also maintaining our, well, sanity. But that all can get rather heady. I’m also an avid cyclist, climber, chef, and science fiction and fantasy consumer, so I spend a lot of time writing training plans, getting strong, preparing delicious food, fueling my body, and nerding out over the minute details of great books and films too.
I’ll post at least once a month about topics like science funding, xenotransplantation, mental training for athletes, why artificial intelligence and genomics have achieved such different impacts on personalized medicine, and — potentially — time travelling viruses. But you’ll just have to wait for that one.
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