My garden in Chorlton, a suburb just south of Manchester, consists of a narrow paved corridor alongside our rented Victorian terrace, leading to a few square metres each of gravel and of earth, all shaded under the tangled bows of a mature apple tree. White paint peels off the high enclosing walls, and weeds with tiny, pretty little flowers grow abundantly from their cracks. The back wall, completely covered in ivy, is in summer flushed through with dainty purple bellflowers, attracting bees in their droves.

I grow vegetables in the uncompromising shade of the apple tree. Last year’s tomatoes were big but flavourless and have been replaced this year with a hopeful row of sugarsnap peas. Rows of green and red lettuce, rainbow chard and fiery radish (sown from last year’s saved seed heads) flank the tree, which is ringed at the base with wild rocket. Three courgettes and a cucumber plant stretch their leaves for every last shaft of sun that glitters between the apple leaves.

It’s a tiny slice of the good life. But even this small shady corner gives so much. Sit still and you are invited into a parallel universe. Red, yellow or black ladybirds hurry along spires of fresh green chives, their alien nymphs scuttling around the rim of the pot. A hundred little spiders build a vast metropolis across the ivy, between washing lines and bamboo canes, their magical silk braced against the breeze. Soft little sage green caterpillars wave their heads from flapping leaves as woodlice trundle over the earth below.

Once, while I was reading in the dappled shade, something fell to the earth out of the corner of my eye. I assumed it was an apple, until it gave a throaty trill and sprang the unmistakable spring of a frog. If I had looked up perhaps I might have seen a heron dropping it. The frog hopped around, apparently unhurt, sheltering under the high rise of a bolted chard.

“Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.” This is how acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who makes field recordings of rare natural sounds, describes the unfolding of the natural world that we can encounter when we stay still enough to allow ourselves to perceive it. I read this quote in Jenny Odell’s fascinating book How to Do Nothing, a poetic and philosophical but also radical text about how to cope with the onslaught of the attention economy in our Extremely Online world and overcome our “species loneliness” – the pain of our alienation from the natural world.

The simple tranquillity of my little Northern garden is a far cry from the chaos of my life just a few years ago. I felt as if Odell had been snooping around inside my mind and had made a prescription just for me when she wrote, “I consider ‘doing nothing’ both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.” While the pandemic allowed so many of us to take account of what we value in our lives, my reckoning arrived a few years earlier.

Rewind to 2016 and I was a news editor in London, overseeing up to 10 stories a day across fashion, art, culture and, increasingly, politics. Being a news editor made me absolutely rabid: I mainlined current affairs and pop culture, but also daily human-rights abuses, corporate greed and catastrophic climate events. I felt a deep humiliation if colleagues found a story before me, and I became so attuned to the news that breaking news literally broke me.

That year was an endless scroll of doom, from gun violence and police brutality to anti-trans bathroom bills and Brexit. There were horrors in Syria, garment-worker misery in Sri Lanka and Trump’s pussy-grabbing, Muslim-banning and wall-building insanity. The dam of my resilience was filling to burst and when it finally broke, my body declared a state of emergency. The day after Trump’s election victory, while I was planning the daily news, I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. I was hyperventilating on the office toilet floor when my editor told me I should probably go home.

The truth is that I didn’t really take a break then. Like a spinning top losing momentum, I lurched through a few more years before finally skittering off into the sidelines. At the time it was terrible, and terrifying, and I would have grimly laughed at the idea anything good could come of it. But looking back now it is clear that I needed to change my life, and I wasn’t going to do it without my hand being forced. Not only did I have news burnout, I had completely tied my self-worth to work. My entire worldview had collapsed into that meme where the world is on fire, and I was drowning in self-loathing.

“Feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully,” as Odell so astutely puts it, was absolutely the end result of investing wholly in an unforgiving cult of productivity, and falling prey to the hopeless fear engendered by streaming the world’s ills 24/7. Her antidote, as the book’s title suggests, is “doing nothing”. But Odell’s is an active kind of nothing. Yes, it’s about switching off your phone and taking time away from work, but the crux of her argument is about slowly, radically cultivating your attention elsewhere. “One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos,” she explains.

For Odell, this meant visiting, nearly every day, a public rose garden near her home. Slowly she became acquainted with the birds, learning their names and then how to identify them by their song. The more attention she paid, the more birdsong leapt out at her everywhere she went, making her not only conscious of her feathered neighbours, but care about them too. “Learning the names of things was my first step in perceiving not just ‘land’ or ‘greenery’, but living bodies instead,” she writes, observing that “eventually, to behold is to become beholden to”.

I didn’t have a quiet garden with an apple tree then, to recover in. But I had something. On the tiny balcony of my high-rise flat in east London I began to grow vegetables in pots. I noticed visiting bugs and learned about roots and soil and mycorrhizal fungi. It was fun and calming and brought me real joy, from harvesting and eating courgettes and tomatoes to watching bees and finding a little brown chrysalis attached to the wall.

Although in the wider news context bees are dying at an alarming rate and soils have been ravaged by industrial farming, the message from my balcony garden was clear: all is not lost. Where there is life, there is hope.

Sometimes something dramatic has to happen for us to make a break with the past. Although my experience of breakdown is unique to me, there are many parallels with how we collectively reacted to the shock of the pandemic. We can see it in the acceleration of the trend known as the Great Resignation and in statistics that show how people have re-evaluated the importance of spending time with family and in nature. I see it most in the way conversations about averting climate catastrophe shifted, after we saw how the running of the world could be fundamentally changed, given enough political will.