A few days before my summer holiday, I caught up with a friend and, over coffee, she asked me where I was going.

‘Saltburn-by-the-sea,’ I announced proudly.

She replaced her mocha in its saucer, looking uneasy.

‘That sounds great,’ she said.

‘But,’ I said, ‘there’s a but, isn’t there?’

‘It’s just…..it’s a bit quiet there,’ she said, ‘what will you do for a week?’

‘Well, what did you do when you were there?’ I asked.

‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I got drunk quite a lot.’

I wasn’t too worried about how to fill my time during my recent holiday. I’d wanted to visit Saltburn-by-the sea, a Victorian town on Yorkshire’s north-east coast, ever since I first read the novel ‘Secrets,’ by Freya North, which made it out to be an eccentric, cheerful sanctuary of a place. I’d already read all of the ’10 things to do in Saltburn’ blogs and I’d planned day trips up and down the coast. And then something inevitable happened. I went to Saltburn and did absolutely nothing.

I went in the bit of time I had between leaving one job and starting another. I could have left for Santorini or Dubrovnik, but I was out of money and frankly, exhausted. The job I’d left had been fairly toxic and, much like holding in your belly all day and then finally letting flop out and be free, all of the fatigue I’d been fighting off for months settled on me during my notice period. A week’s solo seaside holiday sounded ideal – no airport transfers or early flights or security queues. My Airbnb was in a former grocer’s shop and when I turned out the lights at night, I tried to imagine who might have passed through the doors over the years and what sort of stories and lives those customers and proprietors might have had.

On my first morning, I found some excellent coffee at The Sitting Room, a café built into the arches of the town’s railway station, and then wandered down to the sea. I sat down on the fluffy white sand and watched the waves, the tide gently encroaching on the beach. At this point, my brain seemed to split into two. One half was perfectly content to sit still, watching the sea and watching people. The other, anxious half had a meltdown. Weren’t we meant to be DOING something? With our hands at least? Should we draw? Write notes? How could we be productive? There was nothing I needed to do. Nowhere I needed to be. This was what I had come on holiday for and yet, the drive to fill every minute still dogged me.

These two halves of my brain continued their battle throughout the week. We talk so much about the importance of slowing down and stopping, but much less about the anxiety induced when we actually do go cold turkey on our constant activities. My anxious brain couldn’t entirely rest and scolded my other brain for its laziness. The other brain shrugged and slipped into a daily routine where the sea and idleness were key factors. Each day, I got up and found coffee, and then went down to the beach for a few hours to watch the tide come in.

In the afternoon, I would go back again, to watch the tide go out. These hours by the sea had a dreamy quality to them. On the second day, having noted several prodigious jellyfish, lazing in the sand, Ipurchased a pair of wetshoes from the local Sainsbury’s (which could also do you a wetsuit) and wandered through the surf, keeping a beady eye on the horizon (just in case Captain Wentworth should appear!) I jumped in and out of waves, watching the sun cast lacy patterns on the seabed and avoiding the little crab skeletons cartwheeling through the water.

The hiss of the waves was soothing and the quiet of the shoreline and the hugeness of the horizon made me feel enveloped by the landscape, a very small and almost abstract entity caught up in the elements.

I pottered for hours, until my skin stung with salt and hunger pangs called. These afternoons spent walking on the beach under a changing sun and sky were cathartic and lovely, but also a little lonely and imbued with a sense of waiting. There was no purpose to the hours other than to be and to pass gently and yet my mind couldn’t dispense with an ingrained sense of urgency.

I’m fascinated by the concept of time passing – how we try to bend it to our will, hack it so that we make use of every little bit, fill each minute full of useful or productive tasks, so that we can look back, relieved, when we’re old? Trying to let go of the need to use time in a ‘productive’ way was weirdly enlightening and completely infuriating. It was interesting to notice the pressure I put on myself to stuff every second of my time with far too many activities and commitments. What is time spent effectively? How do we make peace with time passing? How do we stay present and enjoy this moment when part of the present is our ego yelling at us that we are wasting time, we aren’t making the best of our lives and we should have splurged on that trip to Santorini after all? These were all questions I pondered as I navigated around yet another sunbathing jelly.

Taking these walks reminded of the Buddhist practice of just sitting too, maybe in meditation, maybe with a cup of tea, and doing nothing at all, not checking your phone, not watching TV, not reading. Just being quiet with your mind. Quite often, this practice makes me want to jump out of my skin, or run off and scream. My mind piles up a list of tasks we should be doing or websites we should be checking or questions we need answering right away and is itchy and furious that we’re not doing anything. After around ten minutes though, it quietens down and something bigger and more peaceful seems to come through in place of the endless chatter, even if it’s just for a breath or two.

Beneath this fractious, surface egotism in Saltburn, there was also a desire to let this bigger, peaceful, expansive mindset come through. The want for quietness, rest and slowness is so often stuffed down and the surface voice, which is always doing and going, is rarely allowed to talk itself out, or to give way to the inner voice which just wants to be and is where all of our (or at least my) deeper knowing and insight lies. It was hard to accept that part of slowing down was having to listen to this fractious surface voice try to shriek even louder, bringing out the worst kind of internal critical monologue. This voice gets really fearful when I try to be still and slow, probably because its purpose in my daily life is to drive me forward, a symptom of perfectionism which I’m still trying to deal with. What I think is interesting, is that, in a way, I didn’t have a choice. Despite the fuss and anxiety, the need for resting won out in the end – the subconscious knowing that sunlight, seawater and idle time alone was exactly what I needed.