I have never been more grateful for a sat-nav in my life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving car window quite so badly either. The journey to Sasbachwalden started well enough: Stuttgart behind us, the Autobahn behaving itself, and my partner smugly announcing that he had "done the research" on our route into the Black Forest. What he had not accounted for was the sat-nav's sudden enthusiasm for what I can only describe as "agricultural shortcuts."

We found ourselves on a track barely wide enough for a determined goat. Branches scraped both sides of the hire car. I developed a nervous twitch. At one point we passed a farmer who simply stared, fork suspended mid-air, as if tourists in a Vauxhall were the most exotic thing he had seen since the last village fete. We reversed two hundred metres to a junction we had somehow missed, my partner's jaw set in that particular way that means he is blaming technology rather than himself. I laughed until my ribs hurt, which he found considerably less amusing than I did.

By the time we reached the cottage, I was ready to kiss the gravel driveway. And then I actually saw the place, and the sat-nav nonsense melted away like morning mist. The house sat among trees with that effortless German tidiness: wooden balconies, flower boxes already brimming with red geraniums, and a garden that looked like someone had spent decades perfecting the art of doing absolutely nothing in it. I immediately decided this was my kind of place.

The owners had left a bottle of local wine on the kitchen table and a note wishing us a peaceful stay. I poured a glass before unpacking a single sock. We stepped onto the balcony and just stood there, listening to nothing much at all. Birds. A distant cowbell. The creak of a pine tree settling. It was maddeningly, gloriously quiet.

I had packed three books with the optimistic intention of "getting through them." In the event, I read perhaps six pages of the first one over the course of a week. The garden proved too distracting. There was a wooden bench positioned in a patch of afternoon sun that seemed specifically engineered for losing track of time. I would sit with my book, notice a bee working its way through the lavender, follow its progress to the next flower, then the next, and suddenly twenty minutes had vanished. My bookmark barely moved.

Mornings became a ritual of slowness. Coffee on the balcony, watching the valley emerge from shadow. The local bakery in the village supplied us with bread that made our usual supermarket loaf taste like cotton wool. We would wander down through lanes so steep my calves filed a formal complaint, buy more than we needed, and wander back even slower. Everything in Sasbachwalden seemed to happen at this deliberate pace. Even the local cats appeared unbothered by the concept of urgency.

One afternoon I caught myself feeling faintly guilty about this profound laziness. I am from a culture that equates busyness with virtue, after all. There I sat, doing nothing of any apparent value, while the world presumably continued its frantic spinning elsewhere. But the guilt passed, as these things do when you give them no fuel. I realised I had been confusing motion with meaning, and that a week of stillness might be the most productive thing I had done in years.

The garden became my universe. I learned which corner caught the morning light, where to retreat when the afternoon grew warm, which spot stayed dry after rain. I watched the same patch of grass grow slightly longer and felt genuinely invested in its progress. My partner took to napping in a hammock that had clearly seen previous guests surrender to the same impulse. His snoring became part of the soundscape, alongside those cowbells and creaking pines.

We did walk to the village occasionally, and once made it as far as a local gasthof for schnitzel that covered the entire plate. But these excursions felt like polite gestures toward activity rather than genuine efforts. The cottage kept pulling us back. Another cup of tea on the balcony. Another chapter abandoned mid-page. Another hour of simply being present in a place that asked nothing of us.

On our final morning, I sat on that sun-warmed bench and tried to fix the garden in my memory. The geraniums, the lavender, the particular quality of light filtering through the pines. I knew that within days of returning home, the old restlessness would creep back in. Emails would demand attention. Deadlines would reassert their tyranny. But I also knew, with a certainty that surprised me, that I could return to this stillness whenever I chose. It was not the place, really. It was the permission I had finally given myself to do very little, and to find that enough.

We packed the car in silence, both of us reluctant to break the spell. The sat-nav, mercifully, found the proper road out. I did not even mind. Some journeys, I had learned, are worth a little getting lost.