I called my little brother on the way to work yesterday.

No reason. Nothing to report. Just picked up the phone somewhere on the drive and called him because I felt like it.

By the afternoon we were still texting. By the drive home, I called him back, because whatever we'd started that morning clearly wasn't finished.

What were we discussing? Everything. But not in the way that sounds.

It started somewhere near the Ship of Theseus — the old thought experiment about a ship that gets one plank replaced at a time until eventually none of the original wood is left. Is it still the same ship? Then we turned that back on ourselves. What makes us, us? Is it the arm? The body? The mind? If the mind, then what is the mind, actually, and why do we think, and how do we connect one thought to the next?

From there, Marcus Aurelius and Cassius, and how Cassius stood up as emperor because he believed Marcus was dead, and whether that could even happen today, and why probably not.

Then words. Who decided what they mean. How enough people believing the same thing turns it into something real — governments, businesses, none of it physical, all of it somehow completely real. Why we tell stories. Why humans do that at all.

Then the great thinkers — who wrote things down and who didn't, Socrates never writing a word, Plato, Aristotle, who to read next.

Then atoms. The size of them. How to even hold the concept of that kind of small in your head. How there's more empty space inside an atom than anything else, and why we don't see that with the naked eye. Then out the other direction — the universe, how far it goes, how unbelievably large and small it goes in both directions.

All of that. On a drive to work and a drive home.

The conversation ended in the supermarket.

I needed noodles for the kids. Ended up walking through the aisles with my phone wedged against my ear, arms full of seven tubs of giant instant noodles, still deep in conversation, when one slipped, then another, and I was crouched in the aisle picking up noodle tubs off the floor while trying to finish a sentence about what it actually means to be a good person.

Had to hang up eventually. Get the noodles home. Feed the kids.

That was it. That was the whole conversation. Started with nothing, ended with me dropping instant noodles in a supermarket.

Here's what I keep coming back to.

Neither of us was trying to win that conversation. Nobody was defending a position or waiting for their turn to speak or trying to be the one who already knew the answer. It wasn't going anywhere in particular. We weren't solving anything. We were just following whatever came up next, because it was interesting, and because neither of us needed the other one to be wrong.

I wish I had more conversations like that.

Socrates never wrote a single word down. He just wandered around Athens asking questions, following whatever thread someone handed him, with no destination in mind. That was the whole method. Not answers. Just the conversation itself, taken seriously.

Most of what passes for conversation now isn't that. It's transactional. Scheduled. Purposeful. Even between friends, there's usually a bit of scorekeeping happening underneath it — who's further along, who said the smarter thing, who's waiting to speak rather than actually listening.

A conversation with no destination, where nobody needs to be right, feels almost indulgent now. Like you're not supposed to have the time.

I don't know if I'll get another one like that anytime soon.

But I know it was one of the best conversations I've had in a long time, and it happened entirely by accident, between a work commute and a supermarket run, over instant noodles I nearly dropped twice.

Thanks, Brother.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson