“Life is a shower of ever-falling atoms of experience, not a narrative line. It is ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'”
–Elizabeth Drew and “Virginia Woolf”
Indeed, these fragments of experience constitute a life, but as Woolf points out, life is essentially whatever consciousness we experience between cradle and grave. If an individual is seeking the essence or quiddity of life, he or she need look no further than what they are aware of as it continuously unfolds and is apprehended in experience, especially by mind. Mental experience and subsequent processing is the key to meaning, purpose, and significance in realizing, understanding, or appreciating in individual life.