My Twitter friends have reported making tiny model libraries, picking locks, building collections of antique scarves or silver pin cushions, doing face yoga, talking to ducks on the Yarra, teaching a pet poodle the moves to Nutbush, timing the boiling of water on different elements, drunk reading in the bath, growing citrus trees, making ginger beer, talking to birds, and my personal favourite, “sticking googly eyes on things to amuse the dog”.

For which I applaud all of you. It’s going to be a long, unrelenting stretch of road: whatever gets you through the day, the night, the next day and then the rest.

But if I could also add one more suggestion: to pursue wonder. For most of us, this means getting outside, if you can, when you can, even when exercising, and as close to nature as you can. If stuck at home, some can look outside, others can plan or plot wonder.

In recent weeks, while reporting daily on the pandemic, along with the fear, anxiety, uncertainty, vulnerability many of us share, trying to analyse the looming presence of a protracted recession and the impact in our children, I have sat on the top of cliffs and stared at surfers carving up monster waves, swum over tattooed Port Jackson sharks, seen the moon align with Jupiter and Saturn in a once-in-a-20-year event, been surrounded by chirping dolphins just off Terrigal Beach, and seen a double rainbow (thinking all the while of the unadulterated joy of the guy on YouTube, double rainbow man, Yosemitebear62).

Yes, I know we’re not all able to sit on cliffs, but I reckon we can do a lot more than we think: tiny miracles are contained in local parks and potting beds.

The point is to pursue this stuff, the wonder that’s often outside front doors, deliberately, to keep ourselves open to the possibility of discovering something extraordinary if we pay enough attention.

One of the joys of having written a book about what you can find when pursuing awe and wonder is that people now regularly alert me to sights or sounds or natural occurrences that otherwise I would have entirely missed. One day recently I was working at home, scratching my head over some domestic violence statistics, and my friend Rob Harcourt, a marine biology professor, a man constantly alert to the cycles, moods and magic of the oceans and skies, texted to tell me there would be whales coming past where I live, out to sea, and that if I swam out past the waves, past the reef, and dived down as far as I could, I would be able to hear them singing. I ran down as fast as my wetsuit would allow, plunged down off the edge of a reef to the ocean floor … and I heard a slow, low, repetitive note of song. I was ecstatic for days.

Three of the things that have kept me going during periods of protracted illness and recovery are: susurrus in the trees (the sound of the wind whispering, rustling), apricity (the feeling of sun warming cold skin on a winter’s day) and, of course, the delicious smell of petrichor. I love these three words.

We’re going to be talking a lot about resilience in the next few months and years. What we need to remember is that resilience is not just an individual characteristic but a social one; we need to work out ways to get each other through this.

(As Professor Ian Hickie from the Sydney University Brain and Mind Centre told me on The Drum the other night, resilience springs from community support, and should not be thought of simply as a stoic trait or private battle of mental health.)

We are bound by suffering, and are here to try to alleviate each other’s suffering. We are also bound by the beauty of the natural world (one we need to fight so much harder to preserve, as many parts are disintegrating before us).

One thing we all share, no matter our views, politics, abiding flaws or personal biases, is a capacity to be blown away by, and absorbed in, the tiny corners and vast horizons of the Earth. Many people have written to me recently about starting up ocean swimming, or getting up religiously to watch the sunrise, or about the behaviours of bees in their backgarden – about what you can see when you are still.

What continues to be surprising is how much these things can sustain us.

In the past few weeks, I have dragged friends and family out into the water and onto cliff edges and alerted strangers to the alignment of two large planets with our moon. There’s such a great pleasure to be had in watching a person's eyes pop.

If you’re bored, glum, restless, or have simply run out of beer, Lego parts or googly eyes, maybe you could compile your own lists: Isobel Joy Bear lists of wonder. These things won’t provide jobs or vaccines. But they will remind us that we are alive, and that this in itself is an astonishing thing.