There are forces of nature, and then there is Twyla Tharp. She has choreographed a zillion dances, collaborated on landmark movies (Hair, Ragtime and Amadeus), and trained several generations of dancers. You could say she is one of America’s greatest creative talents. She would not exactly disagree, but in her landmark book --- THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn It and Use It for Life --- she pretty much defines creativity as muscle memory. Do the right thing the right way every single day, and when you have to do it professionally, you’ll do it at an astonishingly high level.

I worked with Twyla Tharp on the sequel, THE COLLABORATIVE HABIT: Life Lessons for Working Together. Before we began, she warned me: She got up early, worked all day, went to bed early. She expected appointments --- ours included --- to begin a few minutes before the appointed hour: “If you’re not early, you’re late.” You get the idea.

KEEP IT MOVING: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life is not a how-to guide for going gently into the night. She writes: “As age becomes reality, I think we start to retreat, we retract, we become protective, we become secluded, and we begin to ossify.” And then she calls bullshit on all of that.

"KEEP IT MOVING: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life is not a how-to guide for going gently into the night.... At 78, Twyla Tharp is still dancing."

A few years ago, when she was 74, Tharp staged a tour. After each rehearsal, the dancers formed a circle. They joined hands. They looked one another in the eye. And pledged: “I will not go down.” It was a long, hard tour: 44 performances in 10 cities over 66 days. No one went down. Credit training. Credit also that pledge, which is a commitment to the best possible outcome. As she writes: “Have a sense that you can do it, and if you don’t, you will fix it, you will make it work.”

You are not a dancer. You may not be in great shape. No matter: “I tried to write this book for the person who is completely not familiar with their body.” The good news: this is one self-help book that makes no absurd promises. Eternal youth? No way: “We don’t lose youth. Youth stays put. We move on.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audiobook, click here.]

Note that she means “movement” literally.

“You want to know what your body can do. You don’t want to ask if it’s something that it’s incapable of, but the only way to know what you can do is to try. There may not be a great deal of strength in the body. There may be a lot of pain in the body, but the body can still move against itself and have some indication that it is alive and that from there it can move forward.”

You may not feel, even after the considerable encouragement Tharp offers, that you can be nearly that determined. She understands this --- and then she doesn’t:

“A friend of mine came this morning and she’s having a little difficult time and she said, ‘I don’t feel so well. I feel this. I feel that. I feel, feel, feel.’ I said, ‘Forget it with the feeling. Go do. Go do something.’ Doing will soon replace the emptiness of feeling and being out of control. Feelings are out of control? Go do something. You know, go wash a pan, go grow a plant.”

For Tharp, your path as you grow older boils down to this:

1. Acknowledge you have choices. Make them.
2. Your body will be a big part of this deal, and you will be ready and able to implement. Use it.
3. You will be okay to reidentify yourself often along the way.
4. Obstacles --- you will meet many --- go around, over, under or through. Again often.
5. Bounce back --- yes, many, many times.
6. Up is preferred to down.
7. Stamina is your bailiwick. Train. Train more.
8. Bend in the wind.
9. Get stronger for the mending.
10. Dance is being in motion. You are doing it. Do it more.

Underlying every word is an acknowledgment of the hard facts: “I’m getting old. I can’t do what I love." But she still practices dance steps while waiting for the subway. She takes the stairs. She pushes against things and calls that isometric exercise.

At 78, Twyla Tharp is still dancing.