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55. Ted walked briskly down the corridor, the faint echo of Sherman’s voice

Ted walked briskly down the corridor, the faint echo of Sherman’s voice lingering in his ears. The professor’s parting words, cryptic yet precise, gnawed at him. Escape the forces that shape the mind? Shear forces traveling with you? What on earth was he getting at? Ted couldn’t help but feel that Sherman’s uncanny ability to peel back the layers of his thoughts was deliberate, almost as if the professor knew something Ted himself didn’t yet understand.

He stepped outside into the crisp air, adjusting his satchel and glancing around the campus courtyard. Students milled about, chatting, laughing, some hunched over their notes, lost in their own academic whirlpools. For Ted, though, it felt as if the world was spinning slower than usual, each step weighed down by the invisible forces Sherman had alluded to.

As he walked, his mind wandered back to the morning lecture. The discussion of shear forces and bending moments now seemed to carry a dual meaning—bridging the technical and the metaphysical. Was Sherman simply an eccentric professor, or was there something more to his enigmatic remarks?

Ted sighed, shaking his head. You’re overthinking this, he told himself. He’s just a quirky lecturer with a flair for dramatic statements. Still, the thought of the two Shermans—the American author and the British professor—intertwined in his mind. Their overlapping themes of knowing oneself, unseen forces, and transcending the ordinary gnawed at him like an unresolved puzzle.

He glanced down at his satchel, feeling the weight of the books inside. Know Your Mind and You Live After Death by the American Sherman felt heavier now, not just physically but metaphorically, as if they held answers to questions he hadn’t yet formed.

Lost in thought, Ted barely noticed when a friend called out to him. “Hey, Ted! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Ted blinked, forcing a smile. “Nah, just... physics,” he replied, waving off the comment.

But as he continued on, the ghost in question was less about spectral apparitions and more about an idea—an elusive truth lurking just beyond his grasp. The invisible forces Sherman spoke of felt more real now, like they weren’t confined to bridges or cantilever beams but extended to the very fabric of human existence.

He reached a quiet spot on campus, a bench under a sprawling oak tree, and sat down. He pulled out Know Your Mind, flipping through its pages as though it might offer him a key to unlocking Sherman’s cryptic comments. Words like perception, awareness, and higher understanding jumped out at him, their meanings intertwining with the concepts of forces, stability, and equilibrium he’d just learned about in class.

“Maybe there’s something to this,” Ted murmured to himself, a flicker of curiosity igniting within him.

As the sun dipped lower in the sky, casting long shadows across the campus, Ted realized one thing: Sherman, whether knowingly or not, had sparked something in him—a desire to dig deeper, to understand not just the forces that govern the physical world but those that shape the mind and the soul.

With renewed focus, Ted resolved to follow the threads wherever they might lead. After all, whether in engineering or in life, the unseen forces often held the most profound truths.


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