In Sweden, coffee is not fuel. It is not what you gulp on your way to something more important. It is the something more important. The Swedish word fika , pronounced “fee kah,” means to pause for coffee and something sweet, usually with others. It is a daily ritual, as normal as checking email, but designed to do the opposite. It is not about efficiency. It is about stepping away from efficiency’s chokehold.

The Almost Sacred Pause

On our podcast Fifty Words for Snow , my cohost Emily and I search the world for words that have no English equivalent and explore what they reveal about the cultures they come from. When we met Swede Thomas Walch , he explained that fika is a miniature Shabbat.

In offices, people leave their desks and sit together. No one hunches over a paper cup

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