"What is not increased diminishes."   Rumi

      I have said many times that no matter how far you paddle up the river, when you quit paddling, you start to go back to where you were. This is a natural law. The current of the river is constantly flowing down the river to the ocean. If you are working hard to paddle to a certain spot up the river, when you stop paddling, the current is still flowing, and it will take you right back where you started.

     What’s more, it takes absolutely no effort on your part to go back to where you started ; all you have to do is sit there and do nothing and through the natural flow of the river, you will find that, in no time at all, you end up back at the beginning. The only way to stop this from happening is to keep paddling. The river current doesn’t take a day off. If you aren’t working to maintain the position that you have achieved, or working to continue to paddle even further up the river, you will drift back down the river. This is just the way it is.
  
      The same principle applies to your martial arts training and your character training. You may have made great strides towards becoming who you want to be on the path of the warrior, but if you rest on your laurels, you will find that you start to lose what you have worked so hard for. It takes work to maintain your skills; it takes nothing but inaction for those skills to diminish. What you don’t use, you lose. What is not increased diminishes; there is no standing still. You are either moving forward or backward, moving towards your goals or away from your goals. You choose.

Sanders, Bohdi (2013-08-16). Warrior:  The Way of Warriorhood (Warrior Wisdom) (Kindle Locations 1346-1351).  . Kindle Edition.