The Blade That Is Never Finished
- dougkatz8
- Jun 1
- 6 min read
Why Managing ADHD Is a Practice, Not a Destination
I've been back on the Aikido mat for a few months now. Different school, different style, a lot of relearning. And somewhere in that process — in the awkward, humbling experience of being a beginner again with knowledge I didn't have the first time — something clicked that I think is worth talking about.
There's a concept in Aikido and other Japanese martial arts called shugyo. It doesn't translate cleanly into English, and I think that's part of the point. The closest you can get is something like austere practice, or disciplined forging. But what it actually means — what it feels like from the inside — is that improvement is not a destination. It's a permanent state of being. You don't complete shugyo. You live it.
I've been thinking about what that means for people wired like me.
My first Aikido sensei introduced me to the blade metaphor. She was a teacher by profession and taught constantly — on the mat, off it, in everything she said. And what she came back to, again and again, was the idea that a blade is never finished. You grind it. You polish it. You work the edge. You care for it. And then you do it again — not because the last time didn't count, but because that is what a blade requires. Permanently. There is no point at which you put the whetstone away for good.
What she understood — and kept coming back to — is something that most of Western self-improvement culture refuses to accept: the goal is not to arrive. The goal is to keep sharpening.
That concept made sense to me when I first heard it, but it meant something different once I started making blades myself.
I work in carbon steel. Not stainless. Carbon steel performs better, holds a finer edge, but it demands real care. You have to maintain it. Oil it. Sharpen it. Attend to it. Leave it alone long enough and it degrades — not because something went wrong, but because that is the nature of the material. The performance and the demand come from the same source.
When you've actually taken a bar of steel and turned it into a blade with your hands — and then understood that the work doesn't stop there, that it never stops — the metaphor stops being a metaphor. It becomes something you know in your body.
That's when I understood what my sensei had been saying all those years.
Getting back on the mat this time, I came in as something I'd never been before — a beginner with real knowledge. Second-degree black belt in a previous style, years away from training, now starting over in something different. That's an interesting place to be. You understand the art well enough to see your own problems clearly. You just can't hide from them the way a true beginner can.
Both of my senseis — my previous one and the one I train under now — independently identified the same thing. Years apart. Different styles. No conversation between them. Same observation: I use strength instead of technique. I meet force with force. I always have. It served me well in wrestling, in other athletic contexts, in a lot of situations where raw output was the variable that mattered. But Aikido isn't about overpowering an opponent. It's about flow, redirection, understanding what the attacker is doing and working with that energy rather than against it. When I muscle through a technique, I'm not doing Aikido. I'm doing something else and calling it Aikido.
The fact that two senseis, years apart and with no connection to each other, saw the same thing in me wasn't a coincidence. It was the blade showing me exactly where the edge still needs work.
The tendency runs deep. Connected to identity, to muscle memory, to a version of myself I've been building for a long time. It may never be fully resolved. What I can do is understand it, acknowledge it, work with it, manage it — not as a problem I'm solving once and moving on from, but as a practice I'm maintaining. Every session. Permanently.
That is my shugyo on the mat.
Around the same time I came back to Aikido, I was in the middle of a different kind of reckoning — slower, less physical — about how I'm actually wired and what that has meant across my life. Late diagnosis. No medication, because a congenital heart issue closed that door before I ever got to it. And years of navigating something I didn't have a name for, building patterns and systems around tendencies I understood by feel long before I understood them by framework.
When I finally got the ADHD diagnosis, it didn't land as a revelation. It landed as a confirmation. I already knew the patterns. The intensity. The way my mind moves. What changed wasn't the contents. What changed was the context for understanding them.
My instinct, when I got it, was the same instinct I had getting back on the mat. I didn't want to transform into something else. I wanted to keep progressing in the art — to refine and optimize what was already there, not replace it with something unrecognizable. I didn't want to take my second-degree black belt and throw it in the garbage because I was switching styles.
The ADHD diagnosis gave me the same choice. And I made the same call.
My strength on the mat and my ADHD are the same problem wearing different clothes. Both are genuinely mine. Both carry real power. Both will work against me if I don't learn to manage them. Both require the same thing — not elimination, not transformation, but honest, permanent, ongoing practice.
The shugyo on the mat is building enough technique that I don't have to default to strength when things get hard. Strength is my fallback. When pressure rises, that's where I go. The goal isn't to eliminate that — it's to build enough of a toolkit that I have other options available when I need them. So that strength becomes one tool among many rather than the only one I reach for.
The shugyo off the mat works exactly the same way.
The framework I've built for managing this wiring runs in two layers — something I've written about at more length elsewhere. The first is Zen, which most people misunderstand as clearing your mind. It isn't that. It's developing the ability to acknowledge what arises and let it pass without following it. You see the impulse. You don't suppress it and you don't chase it. You acknowledge it and return to where you are. That awareness layer is what makes everything else possible. The second layer is Stoicism — a decision framework for once you've created that small window of awareness. What's actually in my control. What response I'd choose if I weren't reacting. What the situation actually requires.
But the toolkit doesn't stop there. I think the ADHD community makes a mistake by only looking inward — gravitating exclusively toward ADHD-specific coping mechanisms as though the diagnosis defines the boundaries of what's useful. It doesn't. A lot of what works for high-variance minds works because it works for human minds generally. I'm always looking outward — at what researchers and practitioners in communication, influence, and human performance have figured out about how people interact successfully. The diagnosis is the starting point for understanding yourself, not the ceiling on what you're allowed to learn.
The variables never stop changing. Your state of mind shifts. Sleep changes. The environment changes. The person across from you is someone who reliably gets under your skin, or you had a drink, or you're running on four hours. There is no solution that covers every context. There is only the practice — the accumulated toolkit you keep building — and the willingness to keep showing up with it regardless of what the day looks like.
I want to be honest about something before I close.
Accepting shugyo — really accepting it, not just as a concept but as the actual shape of your life going forward — is daunting. It means accepting that you will never fully arrive. That there will be setbacks. That the work you did last week doesn't insulate you from struggling this week.
But here's what I've come to understand: that's not an ADHD problem. That's the human condition. Every person managing something real — a difficult temperament, a pattern they've carried since childhood, anything that doesn't resolve cleanly — knows this feeling. The work doesn't end. You just get better at doing it.
What I hope someone takes from this — from a journey that in many ways was a forced one, because I didn't have the option of a simpler path — is that there is something genuinely valuable in acknowledgment, acceptance, and the commitment to continued improvement. Not as a consolation prize for not being fixed. As the actual thing.
The blade is never finished.
But a blade that is continuously cared for, continuously worked, continuously brought back to its edge — that is a blade worth having.
I am not a clinician — I write from lived experience as a West Point graduate, Army veteran, entrepreneur, and late ADHD diagnosis navigating this wiring without medication. If this framing resonates, the Children of Chaos framework is built around exactly this kind of thinking. Learn more at thechildrenofchaos.substack.com.
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