You can always come back to Jiu jitsu: life is complicated and often it creates times when you have to leave Jiu Jitsu for a time to engage in other priorities. It's natural to think that the time off will be disastrous and then if you ever tried to return you would have lost all your skills and have to start off at the bottom again. My experience is that this is not the case. That in fact, the skills of Jiu jitsu are difficult to learn – so difficult in fact, that they are hard to forget!! What I find is that you quickly lose that fine sense of timing and pace that comes with constant training, but the deep underlying core of your game remains for a long time just waiting to be reactivated. Your first sessions back you feel slow and out of breath, but the timing and pace control that was lost easily also comes back easily – and then you are right back in the saddle!!Look at the example of one of my early black belts, Steve Williams, from a time long before the squad – he took many years off to engage in other life projects, moved around the country and came back recently to the basement – here he is competing in F2W this weekend in high level competition and looking like he never took a day off! So don't worry about the pressures of life interrupting your training – that hard won knowledge and skill of yours is buried deep inside – it's not going anywhere – just look at the example of Mr Williams
