I'm alive to the extent that I can be moved

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft

From Jenny Odell's Saving Time

Older people looking back on their lives sometime say that, if they had the chance to do it over, they would have embraced i more fully. Like Miller's definition of aliveness as "touching) the planet," Handke's description of touching and being touched, or Hartmut Rosa's "resonance" in the epigraph for this chapter, my definition of being alive is simply that: the embrace. I feel alive if I'm not alone in the air, but embraced by it. I feel alive when someone's eyes light up, and mine do too. I feel alive if I can look at a deer and see it looking back at me; if, when geese speak, it sounds like language; if, when I walk on the ground, I feel it pushing back against me. I'm alive to the extent that I can be moved.    (p 258)