I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once followed one into a ford in the Peak District. The journey to Aspo in Blekinge had been textbook Scandinavian so far: spotless roads, forests that looked like they had been hoovered, and that particular Swedish light that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Then, somewhere between Karlskrona and the ferry, I realised with a cold thrill that I had been confidently driving on the right-hand side of the road for a good three miles. On a completely empty stretch, thankfully, but still. I pulled into a layby, laughed until my ribs hurt, and wondered if the holiday cottage came with a defibrillator.

The ferry to Aspo is one of those proper little boats that takes about ten minutes and makes you feel like you have discovered something secret. I stood on deck with the wind doing unflattering things to my hair, watching the island appear through the pines, and felt that lovely shift that happens when you leave ordinary life behind. The cottage sat waiting with its traditional red paint and white trim, the sort of place that looks like it has been there forever and would not mind if you stayed forever too.

Opening the door, I was hit by that particular smell of Swedish summer houses: wood, salt air, and the faint ghost of someone else's excellent holiday. The light poured through the windows in that greedy Nordic way, as if the sun had been saving itself all winter just for this moment. I dumped my bags with theatrical exhaustion, made a cup of tea that tasted better than it had any right to, and promptly did absolutely nothing for two hours. This became the pattern.

Mornings meant waking without an alarm, which felt borderline illicit, and padding down to the water in my socks to see what the weather was doing. The archipelago light changes so constantly that each glance out the window felt like checking a different painting. I developed a serious relationship with the hammock, reading the same paragraph of my novel approximately forty times because I kept dozing off. The book was merely a prop, really. A respectable excuse for horizontal living.

The island itself is small enough that you cannot really get lost, though I managed it once on a gentle stroll to what I thought was the shop but turned out to be someone's very private garden. The owner waved cheerfully from his window, clearly used to confused holidaymakers, and I did a dignified about-turn. Aspo has that lovely quality of being just inhabited enough to feel welcoming and just empty enough to feel like yours. I pottered to the little harbour to watch boats come and go, bought supplies from the local shop where the woman remembered my name by day three, and generally conducted myself with the urgency of a very relaxed cat.

One afternoon I attempted something ambitious: a swim. The Baltic in summer is not exactly balmy, and my entry was less elegant dive and more gradual surrender to inevitability. I emerged feeling absurdly alive, wrapped myself in a towel on the rocks, and watched a sailboat drift past with its sails fat with wind. Doing nothing, I realised, requires practice. I had spent so long equating stillness with laziness, with somehow failing at holiday, that it took actual effort to let myself simply be. The island taught me by example. The pine trees did not seem stressed about productivity. The water lapped the rocks with no particular agenda.

Evenings meant grilling something simple on the barbecue, watching the light stretch impossibly long across the water, and wondering why I did not live like this always. The answer, of course, is that I am a creature of habit and habits are hard things to break, even when they are breaking you. But for a week, I lived in a different rhythm. I read books I had carried for months. I napped without guilt. I walked to the same spot every morning and found it different each time.

On my last day, I packed with the reluctance of a child leaving a party. The ferry carried me back to the mainland, to proper roads and proper sides of them, and I felt the familiar creep of schedules and notifications waiting for me. But something had shifted. I still have a photograph on my phone of that hammock, empty and inviting, and sometimes I look at it when the world feels too fast. It reminds me that doing very little, in the right place, with the right light, might be the most something you can do.