Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others—it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it. —Yo-Yo Ma

As track season comes to an end, I’ve hung up my running shoes. Figuratively—not literally. As a nearly 70-year-old, I’m certainly not in competition form, and it’s been a few years since I ran more than the 50 yards from my house to my daughter’s. I remember my running days, though, and my muscles remember. They remember how it felt to explode from the starting blocks, to make up distance on the first curve, to lengthen my strides on the backstretch, and to run the final curve of the 400 meters into a headwind. They remember the slap of a baton into my palm and the urgent lean across the finish line. In her novel, Dearly, Margaret Atwood writes: You’ll be here but not here, a muscle memory, like hanging a hat on a hook that’s not there any longer. This is it exactly. Unbeknownst to the spectators around me, for years, I’ve been running races from my stadium seat. I’ve been there with them, but not there at all. My muscle memory transports me to the many track meets—high school and collegiate—where I braced myself against the wind, set my starting blocks, and flew down the track.

As we learn and practice a skill, our brains create neural pathways and connections controlling the associated muscles. The more we practice, the more efficient these connections become. Muscle memory, then, is more about brain-building than actual muscle-building. Athletes, musicians, and other professionals testify to how they’ve improved their performance as they’ve strengthened the neural connections created from repetition. I haven’t played the piano for decades, but my fingers still remember how to play the major scales. When I first began taking lessons in elementary school, I often practiced these scales in bed at night, moving my fingers across my percale pillow case as if it were a keyboard, deftly tucking my thumb under my middle finger when I reached F to continue the C major scale. Even though I haven’t practiced or played for years, the neural connections are still there. If I were to sit down at a piano today, I’d be no virtuoso, but my muscle memory would carry me through the scales, one note, one finger at a time.

As we age, muscle memory is both wonderful and awful. Our synapses twitch, our neurons fire, and our muscles remember the way. For a few glorious moments, we feel as though we still have it. We could still run 400 meters in under 60 seconds, no problem. We could still turn a perfect cartwheel, easy peasy. We could still march and play an entire band show, bring it on. For these moments, we remember how it feels to rely on muscle memory. And then, we’re reminded our muscles aren’t what they used to be. Years ago, when my best friend and I chaperoned a group of teenage boys to a Christian music festival, they kept encouraging her to crowd surf. “Do it!” they said. “You know you want to! Just fall back and let yourself be carried along.” For a moment, we both could remember the freedom, how it feels to fall back and float above the heads of concert-goers. Until I broke the reverie with caution. “You really don’t want to break bones and face orthopedic surgery,” I warned. “I speak from experience—don’t do it. You don’t want to be pinned and screwed back together.” Age often does this. It rides in with common sense and caution. It tames a moment of wild glory into a lap dog.

Regardless of our age and muscle condition, however, we can take heart. In her book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Krista Tippett tells us that “hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.” I like this notion of practicing a virtue until it becomes spiritual muscle memory. To do this, you don’t have to have a strong core or biceps. You can do this even if you can no longer play your favorite recital piece or make a lay-up. This is a different kind of muscle memory, neither dependent on age nor physical ability. And consider the smorgasbord of virtues from which you can choose: hope, gratitude, humility, generosity, compassion. Fill your plate, and then go back for seconds. Create new neural pathways and practice until habit becomes spiritual muscle memory.

Some might argue that today, more than ever, a healthy diet of virtues would go a long way toward creating and sustaining a better world. They might argue—and rightfully so—that this is easier said than done, though. It’s likely we all remember the pain and tedium of practicing the same skills again and again. I recall the hours I spent running my fingers through scales when I desperately wanted to play from my Jackson 5 Greatest Hits book for piano beginners. I’m reminded of the hours I spent with relay partners, running through handoffs long after our teammates had gone to the locker rooms. The proverbial words of coaches and teachers still ring true: No pain, no gain. Trusting that temporary pain and tedium will ultimately benefit us, we muscle on through challenging practices.

Whether we’re creating muscle memory or spiritual muscle memory, there’s always a cost. Despite my best intentions, I often struggle to greet the day with gratitude or hope. It doesn’t come easily. The neural pathways I counted on one day are weak—or nonexistent—the next. The spiritual muscle memory I’d previously trusted is gone. When this happens, it’s back to the scales. When my spiritual muscle memory fails me, it’s back to repeated practice. This may take the form of prayer, meditation, or guided reading. I’m reminded of Mother Teresa’s decades-long struggle to feel the presence of God. And yet, she rose each day, and faithfully served India’s most neglected populations, trusting in the God she could neither feel nor see. Through these seasons of darkness, she moved through each day, fully trusting her spiritual muscle memory.

American cellist Yo-Yo Ma reminds us that “your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.” I can imagine myself doing a passable cartwheel, but truthfully, I’m not going to risk it. It could, likely would, end badly. But spiritual muscle memory is another matter. And Yo-Yo Ma reminds us there’s good news. For even when, perhaps especially when, we fail to practice the virtues we’d like to live, we can imagine ourselves practicing them. We can rise each day and imagine moving through the hours with hope, gratitude, generosity, and humility. We can build—or rebuild—these neural pathways by first imagining them. And then? Well, we can trust where our imaginations will take us.

“Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

In the past month, I’ve held book signings at two remarkable Iowa independent bookstores: By the Hearth Bookshop and Coffee House in Bloomfield and Beaverdale Books in Des Moines. These bookstores are two of the country’s 2,844 independent bookstores, according to The American Booksellers Association. Like their fellow bookshops, they’re keeping the magic alive.

In his blog post, “How Bookstores in America are Thriving in 2025,” John Roberts cites how these shops create and nurture a sense of community:

One of the most significant ways bookstores are thriving in 2025 is by fostering a sense of community. Stores are hosting author talks, book signings, and writing workshops that bring readers and writers together. These events not only drive foot traffic but also create a loyal customer base that values the bookstore as a cultural hub.

While I was talking with employees from Beaverdale Books before my book signing, they spoke passionately of their loyal customers who supported the store during the pandemic. Although the store was closed for months, many customers phoned in their book orders and gratefully received them in the parking lot. Others made donations to ensure the business stayed alive. All felt bound by the sense of community their favorite bookstore offered and eagerly returned when it reopened. In my community of Bloomfield, I’ve heard so many residents confess how much they love By the Hearth Bookshop and how it has blessed our community. The bookshop hosts book signings, book clubs, writing classes, Bible studies, and children’s events. It also offers exceptional food and coffee. Like so many other independent bookstores, it serves as a cultural hub.

During the past decade, I’ve read many books about bookstores: historical and contemporary fiction, fantasy, best-sellers, and debut novels. In these works, the bookstore is a place to fall in love, to pass and receive secret messages, to meet with other spies and resistance workers, and to find refuge and delight when life takes us to the mat. Although most of us don’t visit bookstores to drop off coded messages, we do come for the sensory experience: the smell of so many books in their neat stacks, the feel of a book spine in our hands, the sound of customers murmuring recommendations for future reading—or the absence of sound, the beneficent quiet that invites browsing and soulful wandering. You can’t get these sensations from a Kindle or phone. It’s the tangible book in hand. It’s the way your fingers know the way through pages. It’s the way you can talk easily with anyone in the store about the characters in your favorite series, the way you can openly lament finishing a book and bidding farewell to characters who’ve become like family to you. It’s the way you move through the shelves in wonder, eager to discover a book that will make your day and likely change your life.

It’s all this and so much more writes editor and publisher Jason Epstein:

A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

For me and many others, a bookstore is a sanctuary, a sacred meeting place. Like the best poetry, it offers us, in the words of Robert Frost, a “temporary stay against confusion.” In her book, Tilly and the Bookwanderers, Anna James writes that a bookshop “is like a map of the world. There are infinite paths you can take through it and none of them are right or wrong.” Amidst life’s confusion, a bookshop, James contends, gives readers “landmarks to help them find their way.”

As we navigate our loud and increasingly divisive world, we might consider the words of author Jane Smiley:

A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

In a bookstore, competing voices live within the pages of its books, and we’re free to pick our poison—or not. Smiley is right: a bookstore is one of the few places where all these voices—traditional and progressive, spiritual and material, real and fantastical—live companionably within the same walls.

Writers have a particular love affair with bookstores. In Stephen King’s Wasteland, he describes the smell of entering a bookstore as “coming home.” Author Anna Quindlen believes many writers and readers feel about bookstores “the way some people feel about jewelers.” In Paris by the Book, Liam Callanan describes a bookstore as “a safe-deposit box for civilization.” Novelist Nicole Krauss describes a bookstore experience as “a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that could be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.” And writer Jen Campbell claims, “bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.”

Before we sold our family home in Kearney, Nebraska, we investigated the possibility of transforming it from a home to a bookstore. Two of my sisters’ friends were hunting for a bookstore location, and located a few blocks from the university, our house seemed a perfect site. I was thrilled with the prospect of others browsing, reading, and drinking coffee in the places my family had enjoyed for years. But an architect delivered bad news: our home lacked the structural bones to hold the weight of so many shelves and books. Still, these entrepreneurs continued the search and secured a wonderful location. Soon, they will join the family of independent bookstore owners as they launch their new store, Open Book, where they will keep the magic of printed books alive.

As I was packing up to leave Beaverdale Books, I discovered both employees were ardent Elizabeth Strout fans. Within moments, we shared our mutual respect for Strout’s ability to craft characters who felt like real friends. We spoke of the loss we felt as we finished her books. We confessed our great hope that Strout would continue writing, giving us more of the characters and settings we loved. We shared a sense of community: with each other, with these fictional characters, and with the world of booklovers at large. I left the store inordinately happy.

In his novel, American Gods, British writer Neil Gaiman confirms what many of us believe:

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

So, here’s to the independent bookstore, the heart and hub of our communities! And let’s not fool a soul: a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. Perhaps now more than ever, we need the magic of printed books. A bookstore is vital in keeping this magic alive.