On the roof of Romeo, hands full of sealant and a plan called Capo Nord — the last day the old architecture still seemed to work.
I had slept eight hours.
In the book I wrote, “Non so come fai,“ I describe the last normal day I remember. I was on the roof of Romeo — our self-built expedition truck — with Marco, my husband. Hands dirty with sealant, head full of future. We were planning North Cape. Not as a vague idea, but concrete: stages, times, seasons. Light that never ends, huge silences, roads that end in the sea.
My body did everything I asked it to do, without protesting. I thought that was strength. Not stopping. Never showing weakness.
Then came March 7, 2023. “Sjögren’s disease with a fibromyalgia component and inflammatory arthritis.”
After that, eight hours of sleep stopped meaning what it used to mean. Same input, different output. I kept trying to improve the routine that was supposed to fix it.
In control theory — I come from engineering — there are two architectures. Fixed-gain control sets your parameters once, tuned for the worst case you can imagine, and holds them steady. Predictable, as long as your assumptions about the system stay true.
Adaptive control doesn’t assume it knows the system’s limits in advance. It adjusts its own parameters in real time, as the system itself changes.
For fifteen years I was running fixed-gain control on a body that needed the other kind.
I wrote it without the technical words: “I simply stopped resisting life. I stopped fighting what I could not change and began to devote all my energy to the tiny space that remains under my control.”
That is not giving up on improvement. That is changing the architecture.
That is what The 4S Method of Adaptive Intelligence® is: not a set of steps to follow in order, but four anchors to return to when the sea gets rough.
SENSE is state estimation. Listening to signals instead of denying them. Pain is not betrayal, it is information.
SELECT and SIMPLIFY are choosing what you can do today with this body, with this energy, and removing instead of adding. Because energy is not created. It is conserved.
SUSTAIN is what I learned early on: “A breath. A step. A choice. Day after day.”
I didn’t stop growing when I stopped trying to improve.
I stopped running the wrong kind of controller.
Sources
“Symbiotic Control of Uncertain Dynamical Systems: Harnessing Synergy Between Fixed-Gain Control and Adaptive Learning Architectures,” Tansel Yucelen, Selahattin Burak Sarsilmaz, Emre Yildirim — arXiv (2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19139
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