BY MICHAEL C. PATTERSON
To flourish, dance to the music of your aging process.
The dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp wrote a lovely book about aging called Keep It Moving. She makes the point that, too often, the aging process involves a gradual contraction of our physical and mental presence. She encourages us to take inspiration from dancers and to keep moving. To move is to be alive, to engage. Our engagement with life should be expansive; we should expand into our maturity with a dancer’s enthusiasm and creativity.
“Opt for expression over observation, action instead of passivity, risk over safety, the unknown over the familiar. Be deliberate, act with intention. Chase the sublime and the absurd.”
Tharp points out that the challenges of age too often cause us to recoil, to shrink and grow smaller. As we move less, our muscles grow weaker, our tendons become less flexible. Our stature seems diminished both literally and figuratively. Our reach feels shorter. Too often our imagination is suppressed or is ignored. Our perceived influence and social status wanes. We inhabit less space in the theater of our existence.
Like Tharp, I find contraction the wrong strategy for playing out the final acts of our lives. The actor in me wants to end with a flourish. The aging process is the dance partner that is now available to us. To flourish we need to resist the temptation to sit it out and instead accept the invitation to dance.
Tharp offers concrete suggestions on how to take inspiration from dance and flourish as we age. As you might expect from a dancer, one of Tharp’s first suggestions is to take care of our bodies. “Your body is your job. If you don’t work for it, it will not work for you.” We won’t be able to dance with full expression unless we keep body and mind limber, agile, and strong.
And we have to prepare our bodies and minds for the long haul. Long life is an endurance event. It takes stamina to flourish as we age. Dancing takes a lot more energy than does sitting on the sidelines. If you want to dance with the aging process you have to push yourself today so that you have the energy and strength to move well tomorrow.
Tharp also highlights the importance of resilience. She says that long lives inevitably “assume the ebb and flow of a sine wave.” Good times are followed by bad then turn good again. Tharp sees resilience as an opportunity to grow. The downs we experience are not failures, but learning opportunities. We build our resilience by figuring out what went wrong and doing what we can to fix it. Our rebound may not be perfect, it may not restore us to the top of our highest highs, but as long as we are doing it better than before, we are moving in the right direction.
Resilience to the aging process is hard for dancers. Tharp points out that dancers “are trained to accomplish the near impossible.” They are Olympian athletes who have trained their bodies and minds to accomplish super-human feats. They come to expect a “perfected artistry guaranteeing immortality.”
Dancers can make their bodies do the impossible—until they can’t. “Age,” says Tharp “erodes everything a dancer has worked to be since childhood.” Tharp was injured at age 69 and had to face the fact that her body had grown weaker and more fragile. How did she handle this dramatic reminder of her vulnerability? She says over time she discovered a very useful trick, one that could be useful to all of us.
The trick was to measure her success through the challenge in front of her, not the challenges she faced in the past. Her reality—our reality—is here and now, not in some remembered past. We have nothing but the present moment. All we can expect of ourselves is to do the best we can, here and now, dealing with current circumstances, not with conditions that might have existed in the past.
Starting with who we are at this moment in time, we can always continue to move, explore, and grow. We can push the limits of our comfort zones, experiment with new challenges, test the limits of our capabilities. And when we reach limits of our current capabilities we can stop and congratulate ourselves.
Old dancers may not be able to dance as they did when young. but they can still keep dancing. They can explore and perfect a new kind of dancing—the moves of an older person. Who made the rule that only young movements can be beautiful, interesting, expressive, provocative, and seductive? When we fully engage with our aging process, we reveal what it is like to be who we are, in this time and place. We may have limitations, but it is just those constraints that stimulate creative exploration and expression.
Tharp references the Japanese practice of kintsugi, or gold mending, in which gold is used to reconnect broken pieces of porcelain. There is no attempt to reconstruct the flawless perfection of the original pottery. The gold is used, instead, to accentuate the flaws. The seams reveal a new kind of beauty, more complex and surprising. This approach reflects the aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi, in which beauty is found in imperfection, transience, and incompleteness.
We can summarize Tharp’s message as an invitation to dance the wabi-sabi with our aging process. Rather than hide from or deny the changes that come with age, we should embrace them, dance with them. Dancing with our aging process will reveal the fascinating beauty of our imperfections.
Michael C. Patterson had an early career in the theater, then worked at PBS, developing programs and systems to support the educational mission of public television. Michael ran the Staying Sharp brain health program for AARP, then founded MINDRAMP to continue to promote physical wellbeing and mental flourishing for older adults. He currently explores these topics on his MINDRAMP Podcast and his Synapse newsletter. His website is www.mindramp.org.