It started 6 years ago as an improvised chant.
My oldest daughter was learning to pull herself up with the help of her play pen’s fence. She would respond to my wife and I gleefully shouting “up!” and “down!” at her, but she was always more interested in “up”.
As with many things with my babies, I turned it into a fragment of song. This one, was kind of a P-Funk-style chant:
Oh no we’re never down, cuz we’re always up. We’re never down, cuz we’re always up. Uh-uh… (repeat until tired)
Gradually, I realized that this little chant resonated with me on a deeper level. I spent much of my adolescence struggling with my mental health. I didn’t have that terminology at the time. I was just suffering with no perspective. I endured two periods of major depression. As I gathered myself together, I think I kind of reorganized my mind in a way that has helped me be a lot more balanced and resilient. I haven’t been depressed for the better part of 2 decades now.
I’m no expert on mental health, so all I can do is speculate on what changed, but I think a big part is cultivating acceptance and gratitude. Acceptance of my current conditions and a willingness to take on life as it is, rather than how I would want it to be. Gratitude for every day that isn’t like the worst ones that I experienced.
In that context, “never down, always up” is not about toxic positivity, something I very much do not subscribe to. Rather, it means trying to stay free from the feedback loops of negativity I found myself stuck in for so many years. It means looking for paths forward actually available to me, keeping an open mind to unexpected opportunities.
I relate “never down, always up” to playing rugby, where you have to put your body on the line and do things you know will be painful or dangerous on behalf of the team. And then you have to physically pick yourself off the ground, in order to do it again.
I relate “never down, always up” to my experience teaching, where I would experience entire weeks of crushing failure and humiliation, but I showed up in my class 8a Monday morning, as if I had a blank slate.
I relate “never down, always up” to parenting. In the newborn days, literally not having autonomy over when we could sleep. And also the times as they have gotten older when the dynamics of four dysregulated children can really test our sanity. It’s the mentality that it’s about more than the bad parts of the grind, and that the work we put in will be worth it to raise thriving children.
The more I think about it, the more I identify with it. It’s the motto I’ve always wanted. And now it’s also the title of my homepage.
Never Down, Always Up 