Twyla Tharp - Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life

Also by Twyla Tharp

Push Comes to Shove

The Creative Habit

The Collaborative Habit

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2019 by Twyla Tharp

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This Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2019

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket photographs by David Levene / Eyevine / Redux

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tharp, Twyla, author.

Title: Keep it moving : lessons for the rest of your life / Twyla Tharp.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2019. | Summary: One of the worlds leading artistsa living legendand bestselling author of The Creative Habit shares her secrets for harnessing vitality and finding purpose as you age. From insight to action, Keep It Moving is a guidebook for expanding ones possibilities over the course of a lifetimeProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025680 (print) | LCCN 2019025681 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982101305 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982101312 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982101329 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Older people--Psychology. Meaning (Psychology) | Aging

Classification: LCC BF637.S4 T43 2019 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) | DDC 158.1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025680

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025681

ISBN 978-1-9821-3897-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-0132-9 (ebook)

This book is for my grandson, Teph, and his wonderful parents, Jesse and Lea.

Exercise 1:

T wenty years ago, I wrote a book called The Creative Habit, sharing the message that we can all live creative lives if only we could stop waiting for a muse to arrive with divine inspiration and instead just get down to work. In other words, you too can be more creative if you are willing to sweat a little. This message still resonates when I lecture. But, interestingly, the question I am most often asked after a talk these days is on a different topic entirely: How do you keep working? The subtext here, sotto voce, is at your age? Which is seventy-eight.

To me it is simple. I continue to work as I always have, expecting each day to build on the one before. And I do not see why I should not continue to work in this spirit.

Keep It Moving is intended to encourage those who wish to maintain their prime a very long time. Like most books of practical advice, it identifies a disease and offers a cure. That disease, simply put, is our fear of time passing and the resulting aging process. The remedy? The book in your hands.

I flirted with the idea of calling this book The Youth Habit. I liked the suggestion that youths virtues could be easily transplanted into our post-youth years if only we followed a routine: take the stairs, use sunscreen, ingest more omega-3s and fewer omega-6s, dont shortchange yourself on sleep. Cut out sugar, do something nice for someone else daily, floss, read more, watch less, love the one youre with, and its okay to drink wine (until the next study says it isnt). Sounded like a bestseller to me.

But if experience has taught me anything, its that chasing youth is a losing proposition. Theres little benefit in looking back, at least not with yearning or nostalgia or any other melancholy humor. To look back is to cling to something well over and behind you. We dont lose youth. Youth stays put. We move on. We need to face the fact that aging will happen to us along with everybody else and just get on with it. Growing older is a strange stew of hope, despair, couragestill I think you will agreeit is light-years ahead of the alternative.

I dont promise eternal youth in Keep It Moving. I have no interest in sugarcoating the aging process. What I believe in is change and the vitality it brings. Vitality means moving through life with energy and vigor, making deliberate choices and putting to good use the time and energy that we have been granted. You have, no doubt, seen people in their late seventies or even into their nineties who dont seem worn out by their years but instead welcome the opportunity to be truly present in their bodies and in their minds. Instead of stubbornly staying on known paths, afraid to stray, they look at what comes next with curiosity, expanding into whatever it may be.

So, no, this book is not The Youth Habit. Nor is it The Creative Habitwhich promotes regularity in living and workingbecause as we grow older, it is just as important to break habits as it is to make them.

I want to reprogram how you think about aging by getting rid of two corrosive ideas. First, that you need to emulate youth, resolving to live in a corner of the denial closet marked reserved for aged. Second, that your life must contract with time. Lets start by breaking some old thought patterns.

Ive danced my entire life (and still do) and Ive spent time with many great performers. For these dancers and athletes, the passage of time presents mostly difficult realities. The jump declines, speed diminishes, flexibility is challenged. And fear of decline and irrelevance starts early.

Years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a dancer of remarkable talents, Mikhail Baryshnikov. We had just finished one of the early rehearsals for Push Comes to Shove, a ballet I wrote for him. Even then it was clear that he was a phenomenon, one of the very greatest classical dancers of the twentieth century. Though he was in his prime, he was looking morose as we drank our coffee. I asked him, Misha, whats the matter? You dont like what were doing? No, he said, he loved what we were doing; But, he added, soon we will be old. He was all of twenty-seven. And yet I understood.

For dancers, aging is ever in front of us as we work. We face it each time we enter the studio, one day older than the day before. But who among us in the civilian population has not shared the feeling that they, too, will be finished by forty? It needles when things dont work the way they used to. And it doesnt help that, gradually, as joints begin to ache and memory to slip, we are bombarded by negative messages from our culture. Older adults are frequently portrayed as out of touch, useless, feeble, incompetent, pitiful, and irrelevant. Sadly, these dismal expectations can become self-fulfilling, creating the bias that fuels our roaring age industrypills, diets, special cosmetics, surgeryall promising to send time reeling backward. But no. Time goes only one way: forward.

The result? Frustration becomes a habit. Little indignities become a reason to rant and complain. But that scenario will bleed out your spirit, take away your resiliencies. If you go into situations always expecting to be cheated or deprived, youll likely find ways to tell yourself that is exactly what has happened. Dont go searching for things that confirm or fuel your sense of indignation. It will become a default mind-set promoting more of the same.