I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to leave my walking boots on the train at Krakow. There I was, standing on the platform in my socks, watching my only sensible footwear disappear towards the Czech border. My partner just sighed in that particular way she has, the one that says she loves me but also wonders how I function as an adult. We found a shop in Zakopane that sold me some gloriously ugly replacement boots, bright orange things that made me look like a lost traffic cone wandering the mountains.

The drive up to Koscielisko took about twenty minutes from Zakopane, winding through pine forests with the Tatra peaks suddenly appearing around every bend like someone kept opening enormous grey curtains. Our cottage sat near the edge of the village, wooden and solid with that distinctive highland roof, the kind that looks like it's wearing a very thick thatched hat. I immediately decided the orange boots were a brilliant mistake because they were so comfortable I wore them for everything, even sitting on the terrace with a cup of tea.

That first afternoon, we did absolutely nothing. The sun fell across the wooden deck in thick warm slabs, and we just sat there like two cats who had finally found the perfect windowsill. I had brought three books and started none of them, too busy watching the light move across the meadow behind the cottage and listening to what I later learned were probably choughs, those red-billed mountain birds that sound like they're chuckling at you. The quiet was not empty quiet. It was full of small sounds, wind in the pines, distant cow bells, my own breathing slowing down to something resembling normal human rhythm.

I realised I had been holding tension in my shoulders since approximately March. Maybe longer. The kind of tightness that becomes so familiar you stop noticing it, like a bad smell in your own house. Sitting in that sunshine, feeling it actually warm my bones, I became aware of each knot unclenching one by one. It was not dramatic. No angels sang. Just a gradual softening, like butter left out on a kitchen counter.

The next few days established a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching mist clear from the lower slopes. A slow wander down to the village for bread and cheese, the orange boots clomping along lanes where wooden houses leaned together like old friends sharing secrets. Back by midday for sandwiches and reading in the sun, actual reading this time, though I kept dozing off with the book on my chest like some elderly uncle after Christmas dinner. Sometimes we walked barely half a mile to a meadow and just lay in the grass, watching clouds perform their slow transformations above the peaks.

I became an expert at very little. Identifying the best sun spots at different times of day. Remembering how to do absolutely nothing without checking my phone. The small triumph of timing a walk to return exactly when the afternoon light turned golden on the cottage's wooden walls. These achievements would impress no one, which was rather the point.

On our last evening, I sat on that terrace in my ridiculous boots with a beer, watching shadows lengthen across the meadow. My partner was inside making supper, humming something tuneless. I thought about all the holidays where I had rushed about seeing things, ticking boxes, coming home exhausted. This had been different. This had been a remembering, a relearning of how to be still without feeling guilty about it. The mountains did not care what I achieved. The sun asked nothing of me but presence.

I still have those orange boots. They live in my cupboard, waiting for the next time I need to wander slowly somewhere beautiful and forget how to be busy.