My ongoing dialogue with Punya about determinism, randomness, and the stories we tell about our lives had been sitting with me in a particular way as I boarded a flight to Stockholm for a conference. I was heading to a conference to present work on the Innervate Lab, and somewhere over the Atlantic, still turning these ideas over, I found Edge of Tomorrow in the seat back menu and decided it was as good a time as any. My wife had always urged me to watch it, but sometimes the screen size discourages me, especially when the film has set pieces. Anyhow, there are parts of the movie that I find to be shortcomings, but all in all, it is an underrated sci-fi action movie that says more than the typical Tom Cruise thriller. Planes being what they are, turbulence and announcements and the existential negotiation of armrest territory, I actually watched it in its entirety.

The conference itself was energizing in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and much of that had to do with something I hadn’t expected to encounter as a cultural practice: fika. In Sweden, fika is not simply a coffee break. It is closer to a social institution, a moment taken twice daily by people of nearly all ages and professions to step away from the work, pour something warm, and simply be with other people without agenda. Fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, with no deliverables and no structured networking, just conversation, pastry, and the quiet permission to breathe. What struck me most in Stockholm was how seriously this was taken, not as an indulgence or a disruption, but as a rhythm embedded in the day. In one of those fika moments at the conference, a pair of graduate students approached me after learning that Punya and I were collaborators, and they proceeded, delightfully, to nerd out about his TPACK framework with an enthusiasm that no structured panel session could have produced! That connection, genuine and unplanned, happened because fika created the conditions for it. It was a break in the routine that paradoxically made the rest of the day more meaningful.

Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and based on the Japanese novel All You Need is Kill, is an underrated entry in Tom Cruise’s catalog, imperfect and occasionally overwrought but genuinely clever in ways that action films rarely are. The premise is a Groundhog Day style time loop set against a large scale war with an alien species that has invaded Europe. Cruise plays Major Cage, a military public relations officer with no combat experience who finds himself dropped into the front lines of an amphibious assault on the beaches of France. He dies almost immediately, and then he wakes up at the same military base on the same morning and does it all again. And again. The alien species have engineered the loop; it is their design, their advantage. The same day repeats with mechanical precision, and almost no one is aware of it.

What makes Cage’s arc interesting is not that he becomes a great soldier. He does grow more capable over time, repetition will do that, but his decisive advantage is never really physical. It is perceptual. There is a moment early in his loops when he arrives again at the military base at Heathrow and something shifts: he begins to see the routine rather than simply moving through it. He notices the details, the sequence of events, the patterns, the tells. He steps outside the flow long enough to recognize the flow. That act of recognition, small and quiet amid the chaos, is what plants the seeds of everything that follows. The regularity of the loop is not his enemy because without it he could not predict, prepare, or adapt. But it is only by temporarily breaking from the rhythm, by pausing and observing and standing slightly outside the momentum of the day, that he can make use of what the repetition has taught him. He needed, in short, a fika moment, and in that brief pause, exhausted and war worn on a repeating battlefield, something finally clicked. Unfortunately, he did not have coffee, tea, or even a pastry! But the revelation was his.

There is a particular way we tend to teach in STEM, and honestly in much of formal schooling, that resembles less a journey and more a mechanical race toward an unseen finish line, one that has been culturally pre-drawn to look like a specific kind of success. Routine governs everything: the schedule, the pacing, the sequence of topics, the rhythm of assessment. And there is a billion dollar industry of productivity frameworks and habit systems ready to back this up, because routine is not without value. Neuroscience and learning research are clear that repetition and consistency are how the brain builds durable knowledge, how skills become habitual, how fluency develops. That is real and worth honoring. But somewhere in the relentless forward motion toward a culturally prescribed destination, we forgot to build in the pause. Beyond kindergarten, rest in the classroom is largely treated as lost time, a concession rather than a pedagogical choice. We run the loop and call it rigor.

What we need, I would argue, is the spirit of fika. A deliberate moment to breathe, to sit with what has been experienced, observed, and discussed, without the pressure of immediately converting it into a measurable outcome. Because here is what Edge of Tomorrow quietly reveals: every soldier on that beach is looping too. They are all repeating the same conditions, receiving the same instructions, operating within the same environment, and yet none of them develop because none of them recognize the loop they are in. They mistake repetition for progress. What is remarkable about Cage is not that he arrives as a finished product (quite different than most Cruise savior movies). He is, by his own admission, not a warrior and not equipped for battle. But the recognition of the pattern is what allows him to sharpen his perspective and, gradually, his capabilities. He had the potential all along; the unexamined mechanical routine simply never created the conditions for him to realize it. What if we built that recognition into our classrooms? What if both educators and students developed the habit of periodically stepping outside the momentum to observe the routine, name the shortcomings, identify the strengths, and sit with what they have actually learned? The loop would not disappear, but it would no longer produce delusion.

This connects back to Punya’s response to Chapter 4, in which he described the art of syllabus design through the lens of ‘Die Hard.’ He explained that moments of reflection and pause are more necessary than content overload. In his syllabi, he often lets the semester’s discussions, student interests, and emergent themes do the driving, instead of a predetermined pace: “A week to simply sit with what they’ve learned. A stage on which to make their understanding visible to others.” This is the concept of fika in action, not just in classroom activity but built into the very framework of a semester’s syllabus.

As I boarded my flight back, I was thinking about our ongoing dialogue about determinism. Somewhere over the Atlantic, still churning these ideas, I found myself reaching for the seat screen. Edge of Tomorrow was still there, and I started it again from the beginning. Oh no…