Patio Pondering: Muscle Memory

This morning dawned sunny and bright. The forecasted frost never came, and with hot coffee in hand, it looks to be a great start to the last day of the week.

Yesterday a friend sent me a short video of pianist Maria João Pires, who came to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23—only to realize, seconds before the orchestra began, that they were performing No. 20 instead. For a moment she was stunned. Then, as the music swelled, she relaxed, trusted her training, and played flawlessly. Her fingers remembered what her mind had forgotten.

Watching her, I thought about muscle memory in my own life. Earlier this week I was working soybean stubble ground to repair ruts and compaction from a wet spring. For those of us who grew up running tillage—whether it was a disc, a plow, or a field cultivator—you get it. You feel it. It’s like driving a car down a gravel road; you don’t stare at the shoulder to stay centered, you just know where it is.

That’s how tillage works when you’re the one actually holding the wheel. I’m not talking about auto-steer; I mean when you’re fully in control of the tractor. You feel where the equipment is behind you and where the tractor needs to be in relation to the last pass or the field edge. Before long, you don’t have to look back—you just sense it. You focus on the horizon, and everything else falls into place. That’s muscle memory.

I learned that feel back in 1986 on an old International H with an eight-foot disc. Over time, it became second nature as I worked with bigger and bigger tillage implements over the years, just as Pires relied on hers. And it’s not limited to fieldwork. In my years as a swine nutritionist, problems sometimes hit my desk that felt hauntingly familiar. The data, the symptoms, the customer’s tone—it all echoed past experiences. Like Maria João Pires in that moment of panic, I’ve had to pause, take a breath, and trust that I’ve played this tune before. That same muscle memory—the quiet confidence built through repetition—guides my hands even when the situation changes key.

Experience doesn’t just teach us what to do; it trains us to feel when something’s right—or when it isn’t. And more importantly, when we lean into that experience—our own muscle memory—like Pires, we can overcome the unexpected challenges that land in front of us.

Where in your work do you trust your own kind of muscle memory?