Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life

by Twyla Tharp

Jump One: Sky Jump

Jump straight up. Reach to the heavens with your arms. Repeat many times—at least three.

Ski...

March in Place

Traveling

Note, as ever: the body prefers moving forward to going backward.

Try “Boogaboo,” a joy by Jelly Roll Morton, and jump. Or “Stompin’ at the Savoy” by Louis Armstrong. Do what it says.

“Flying Home.” I defy you to stand still. Jumps are jitterbug, and it is that high velocity and power that got us through World War II.

the Ur powerhouse march, the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symp...

Look for the maximum-octane music your body already has loaded in its muscle memory from past listenings, then get jumping.

B52s! DEVO! Talking Heads!

the body takes over and the brain takes a rest.

reward will be the runner’s endorphins. Literally...

So far I have boxed “Take Up Space,” “Mark Your Day,” “Let It Go.” Now, with “Jump For Joy,”

boxes are your verb area.

I am indeed reminding you that you, too, my dearest re...

maximize the power input and do it with a comm...

Ballet for beginners? Why not? It may not be a pretty picture, but so what? Give it a try.

Find a group activity with momentum, the key factor to keeping old age away.

I look for optimism when I select my dancers.

Using optimism as fuel, they choose to dance, fully aware that the time will come when they cannot continue professionally.

They will put on a show for the folks, and the folks will come along, and in this, there is joy and purpose.

In working with groups, I have always found that a committed dancer with a positive attitude is more to our advantage than a difficult one with massive talents.

As you move, allow only positive images—adoring crowds yelling, hard-won fights where failure is not an option—to help you turn up the heat and drive harder.

It is where we have to be in order to accomplish r...

Believe in yourself and your purpose and ...

And talk to the body with kind words—at least as encouraging as you would use to ...

Learn to become your own c...

We all had ideas of what our life would look like when we were younger, and sometimes it is a tremendous drain on our motivation to look at where we’ve landed and fin...

it sucks when life doesn’t turn out how we’d have liked, but tough luck.

Too often, aging can promote a condition identified by psychologists

learned helplessness.

This shows up when we are conditioned to expect pain or discomfort and we make a peremptory retreat t...

Believing we cannot change our outcome leads to lethargy.

Negativity and stagnation go hand in hand. We learn to stay put.

The way to boost your mood for real, in a sustained way, is to line up your a...

dread emerges when we do not support our...

What in your life is not contributing to ...

Is optimism more difficult with age? A bit. Philip Roth liked to stare down his face in the mirror early in the morning when he was working and say, “Attack, attack.”

The tougher it gets, the more positive you need to be.

Mark these words.

Still, even for the faithful, there will be whining days. There will be kvetching.

That’s your cue to get funny.

It demonstrates two truths about our kvetching: sometimes we get so attached to our grievances that we hate to give them up, and the best person to address the complaint is the complainer.

When I catch myself kvetching, I try to zoom out, to place myself in the audience of my life so I can get a little perspective—is this a woe worth addressing?—and

When I find myself kvetching, I ask, Is this something I can change? If not, then I try to shut up and move on and in so doing, set to work on improving my lot.

He was full-out every time—wholehearted every time. He simply did not let down. Fortitude in spades.

Like they say, dying is easy, comedy is hard.

When you are kvetching, ask yourself, What are you complaining about? What is the change

that you would like to see happen? Is it something you can fix? Then fix it. Beware

It was you, my friend, I remind myself, who made this choice. So when you find yourself grousing, my tough-love advice: pull up your socks.

protecting our hard-won positivity gains is sometimes best done by learning how to say no.