Bertrand Russell once wrote a 5,000 word essay in praise of idleness, but I don't have the time to match his dedication to the lazy. In between postgraduate study, political activism, community projects and a modicum of social life the closest I usually come is gardening or neighbours.

Yet Russell's tract fascinates me, the slow food movement invades my dreams, my Taoist inclinations tut at my hectic striving. So I present here my own ode to idleness, a reflection on my own pursuit of passivity.

I first strove to "go slow" a couple of years ago, when I found my eyes and brain were aching from working almost all of the time. I resolved to go on more walks and bike rides, do more gardening (I grow some veg in the flowerbeds), playing on the Nintendo 64, read novels and magazines rather than web sites and academic books. For a while I managed to spend one day a week just doing this, but it was too forced and I quickly lapsed into checking emails in the evening under a pretence of searching for a recipe.

I've repeated this pattern several times since. Gradually I'm starting to appreciate that the benefits of a slow lifestyle go beyond sharper eyesight and fewer headaches, and that episodic indulgences don't really do the trick. More time spent outdoors makes me feel happier, healthier and gives me a sense of timelessness away from deadlines.

This feeling reminds me of my month-long holiday travelling around the continent by rail with a school friend. With barely enough money for youth hostels and extremely basic food we spent most days wandering aimlessly around city centres making up games. Our favourite involved trying to imitate old people by taking as long as possible to walk to a bin and back, taking time to observe inconspicuous bushes and consider the contents of one's pockets. Not only did we spend more time together building a stronger friendship than we would have been had we spent lots of money in bars, museums and tourist traps, but we also had a lot of fun being more creative.

This kind of spontaneous creativity makes you appreciate things in close to their full richness. Just finding more creative approaches to ordinary situations, whether I'm cooking dinner or meeting people in a pub, helps me to explore and indulge in my life more fully. Creativity springs from passivity.

I often find, sat in pubs with people I hardly know, a real difficulty sustaining conversations without being extremely silly. How long can you listen to somebody babbling on about getting drunk or their favourite band before you resort to the absurd? Allowing conversations to unfold over time, over different meetings, grants you the luxury of exploring each others real interests, passions, opinions and so on without having to lean on tired aphorisms (how many times have you heard: "communism is OK in theory but not much cop in practise"?)

But back to our holiday - trains are a wonderfully passive form of travel. You sit back and learn to appreciate periods of time with nothing to occupy you. Whereas flights pick you up in rainy Stanstead and dump you in a sweaty airport hundreds of miles away, trains give you a sense of the country you're travelling to. I despair at the thought of becoming a commuter again, where fifteen minute delays elicit extravagant rants about the state of British railways. A month spent abroad with no itinerary, just enough money and a train pass is a wonderful thing.

On my walks I regain this sense of timelessness. I'm slowly re-learning the names of plants and animals that we learn as a kid but quickly replace with corporate brands and celebrities, be they "alternative" rockers or Big Brother blockheads. Perhaps "timelessness" is the wrong word, because really I rediscover a different sense of time on my travels, whether around Reading on bike or Europe on train. An organic farmer I know from Canada complains that, whilst Tories accuse everyone from socialists to urban elites for destroying the countryside, in reality the loss of the rural way of life is the fault of the rural population. By adopting the clock, the TV and the car they have divorced themselves from a rural "time consciousness", they live according to the urban beat and so are drawn to cities. The countryside, with its naturally slower rhythm of life, is boring and backwards, and so dies.

By going slow I can not only relax myself, be more creative and get to know my surroundings better - I can also ground myself in the environment.

On my Saturdays off I would find this almost impossible, unfortunately. I was still conscious of urban time, I would look at the clock and wonder whether I could eat lunch early and drag out the walk in the afternoon to compensate. Over the last summer, with all my fellow graduates leaving me alone in Reading, I got to spend a few months winding down and organising my time according to the garden, neighbours and late night films. But as soon as my MA started I reverted to a super-charged urban time consciousness and my walks, bike rides and gardening all lost much of their charm.

The brief episodes on weekends are made harder by my principal interest - activism. When you're trying to change your university's environmental policies, promote and protect free culture locally and internationally, or doing anything else of the sort, you have a perpetual sense of urgency; more can always be done, and I feel compelled to act. Even if I wanted to slow my contributions down there is always another government review submission deadline, or an event that needs organising, on the horizon to keep me engaged.

It's not just action that holds me to my urban time consciousness. Reflection is the activity of the mind - a passive mind being meditative - and as any student knows long periods of intense thought are exhausting. This gets worse with activism, where reflection is also up against deadlines. I prefer to develop my understanding of complex issues over days, weeks, even years where possible before having to make a hard decision. But with activism you must always compromise and act, otherwise you become another inactive academic or armchair politician.

Making decisions is a particularly frenetic kind of activity. Even if well facilitated, consensus processes can drag on for hours beyond the allotted time as participants try to seek out commonalities and contentions, to influence one another, and ultimately to reach a common agenda for action. Frustration often gets the better of people, who lash out in impatience and call for quick majority votes and prompt action. But too much speed can frustrate our ability to think clearly and thoroughly.

In Sioux culture, no decision would be made without reference to the will of the seven generations previous and in consideration for its effects and consequences for the seven generations following. Their time consciousness is expanded beyond the rushed meeting into deep time, giving them a profound perspective. Giving time for reflection, albeit active, can be beneficial within meetings, and over the course of our lives passive reflection can help us integrate different facts and perspectives more effectively.

The Sioux have another interesting notion that embeds this process of integration in their consciousness. We are supposed to speak from "the centre of the voice", which is located at the centre of a cross with each of the four points representing dimensions of thought. The Sioux seek to integrate wisdom, integrity, stability, and dignity, whilst Rossenstock-Huessy posited the past, future, inner and outer (axes of time and space). The idea behind their necessarily mystical explanations is that by trying to integrate the four dimensions into a decision that respects and reflects each one, we come to better decisions.

Giving time to reflect passively allows our mind to chew over the problems, and through active reflection we can try to heal divergent strands of thought. And we shouldn't only adopt this approach in decision making, but throughout our lives so that we heal ourselves.

This may not seem especially helpful when you're sat in a meeting trying to make a decision, but when you try to speak from the centre of the voice in all aspects of your life you start to gain a sense of deep time and integrity that puts the issues in perspective. As a more immediate practical exercise, juxtaposing opposites in two dimensions and seeing how they inform each other can help with understanding, just as the courtroom has the judge-jury to integrate the conflict between the prosecution-defence.

Returning to the dull pub conversations, for example, we can go further than dismissing them as boring. We might begin by analysing the regurgitation of aphorisms according to one axis - creative-consumptive - and conclude that dull people suffer from a sterile lack of imagination and originality, preferring to communicate a consumed truth rather than one that they have creatively engaged with. The dull conversationalist is unbalanced in this sense. We might then synthesise this with an analysis according to the action-reflection axis, noting that boring people prefer to act rather than reflect leading to regurgitated rather than critical opinions. But then we might also be talking to an intellectual egotist who takes no time to seek out and understand others' thoughts, preferring to improvise their own and thus having shallow opinions, in the sense that they are unbalanced towards the individual and away from society (the Sioux inner and outer). So we see that reflection requires creativity and consumption in balance, as does action; and creativity should be both active and reflexive. Analysis and synthesis take us closer to understanding ourselves and human nature (another inner and outer, the individual difference and species unity).

We can use this approach to see 'going slow' as a healing process, seeking to achieve better balance on certain axes. Contrasting "slow" and "fast" isn't quite appropriate for me, however. As Milan Kundera remarked, it is a condition of modernity that "time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome with greater speed." It isn't that I seek to overcome time by going fast, but that I seek to overutilise time with hyperactivity. Better than fast and slow would be activity and passivity, marking the difference between striving and allowing things to unfold of their own accord.

Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy, has a phrase "tzu-jan" that roughly translates as "by itself so". It encapsulates the nature or essence of something that requires no further explanation, and that simply is. We can, for example, rationalise our breathing and ask ourselves to breath in and out, but it is better to breath without striving. Gardening allows me to act passively, just as meditation helps reflect passively. Going slow is the integration of the passive and active, particularly through their synthesis/integration with reflection and action.

By healing myself, by grounding myself in the environment and adjusting my time consciousness, I get closer to my unconditioned, spontaneous nature. My mistake with the lazy Saturdays was to strive for passivity as an absolute, one day a week, rather than shifting my entire life towards passivity and balance. Passivity cannot be pursued, much to the chagrin of my activist inclinations.