03

I chose Bonaire because it promised nothing. A small Dutch Caribbean island of about 26,000 people, blue water, a beach, the slow rhythm of waves. I was run down and stretched across a life full of shoulds, and all I wanted was to sit by the sea and reset.

The questions started before I'd even packed. While other visitors read up on beaches and bars, I found myself reading about a landmark case in which islanders had taken the Dutch State to court over climate change and, for now, won. By the time I landed, I had a few questions I wanted to bring with me, and a couple of people I hoped to meet.

On the first afternoon, I did exactly what I'd come for. I lay on the beach and let the water do its work. Then the island began to open up.

A plate of Javanese-Surinamese food, cooked by a family whose great-grandfather had left Java for Suriname, tasted so much like what I grew up eating in Singapore that I spent an evening reading about migration across two oceans. A small museum exhibition on climate change and gender inequality.

Then the salt pans in the south, where the court case I'd read about stopped being words on a page. Stone huts built for enslaved salt workers still stand there, on land so low that seawater already sometimes floods the road around them.

And there was the national park. Washington Slagbaai is rugged and beautiful, and I loved every mile of it. But I live in Washington, so I asked our guide about the name. Nothing to do with Washington, he said, and moved on.

I couldn't let it go. The answer, when I found it, turned out to be a joke, and a sharp one. In 1920, part of the estate was bought by two brothers who renamed it America. Every week, workers from the village of Rincon trekked on foot to its headquarters to collect their wages, often paid in food rather than cash. So where, they joked, were they walking to all that way? The capital of America, of course. Washington. When the land became the first nature sanctuary in the Netherlands Antilles in 1969, the name stayed.

By any standard definition, I failed at my holiday. I read, asked, wandered and chased. And I came home restored.

It wasn't activity that had worn me out before I left. It was the shoulds, some handed to me, many absorbed so long ago they felt like my own. On Bonaire, for a few days, I lived entirely by my own curiosity. Maybe that's the freedom we feel on holiday. It's why we buy flowing dresses and loud shirts we'd never wear on a Monday in DC. Away from the shoulds, we try on the person we'd like to be.

The psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci found something similar. Doing things because we feel we must drains our energy. Doing things we've chosen for ourselves doesn't, and the right ones can restore it. Recharging doesn't come in one form. For some people it's a hundred-mile ride up a mountain. For me, it was a rabbit hole.

Still, as the propeller plane lifted off for Curaçao, I felt a twinge. A few days hadn't been enough. I'd found an island far richer than its size suggested, with more beaches to lie on and more questions to chase than I'd had time for. Most of us rarely get both, the time to rest and the time to explore. We go back to jobs and lives and the people who count on us, and to the shoulds waiting by the front door.

Below the wing, Bonaire shrank to a strip of blue and brown. I was already making a list for next time.