Keep It Moving

Keep It Moving is Twyla Tharp’s newest book. Nearing 80, vibrant and productive, a creative tornado, a no-nonsense powerhouse, she ruminates on how to live with purpose as time passes.

After the first chapter, gloriously and emboldenly entitled “Take Up Space,” the book devolves into mostly standard generic self-help advice (e.g. take care of your body, take risks, build resilience, etc.). But because it is coming from Twyla Tharp, a woman of enormous energy and extraordinary vitality, it feels authentic (not to mention hard-won), imbued with a deep wisdom—and an engagingly stern attitude—missing from other such “literature” like those perky women’s magazine columns or those mountains of follow-this-fad books.

But it is not the nothing-new-here advice, or the little exercises (I don’t mean push-ups) she offers that has stayed with me, that I want to pass along to you. It is these statements.

To look back is to cling to something well over and behind you. We don’t lose youth. Youth stays put. We move on.

Age is not the enemy. Stagnation is the enemy. Complacency is the enemy. Stasis is the enemy.

Choose to make your life bigger. Opt for expression over observation, action instead of passivity, risk over safety, the unknown over the familiar. Be deliberate. Act with intention.

Evaluate your accomplishments as beginnings rather than endings.

And finally:

Bend in the wind.

Get stronger for the mending.