What is "life"?

I wonder when/if we will figure out what “life” is? I had the thought the other day that everything is trying to be. The thing of it is, it is trying to be what it is. We humans try to figure out what we will be, i.e., “what do you want to be when you grow up?” This “being” is usually referring to an occupation, “I want to be a doctor or a fireman or a mom or a pilot.” The list is endless. The little bunny in my yard doesn’t think that way – it is too busy just being. Sometimes I think my pet birds try to be people, like when they want me to walk with them, deliberately not going under the kitchen table so they can walk around it with me so maybe they can conceive of “being” in a way similar to how we humans see it. But if you take it down to the microscopic level, the bacteria, germs and viruses – they too are trying to just be. It’s too bad their “being” means making us sick but they are not trying to do that – they just are “being”. And even the more inanimate things in the world we can perceive, the trees are just being trees, rocks being rocks. So life is not what we are being. Life is that we be. Can it ever be absent? Gone? If our body dies, there are still all the cells and chemicals it is composed of continuing to be, though they transform. Hmm – come to think of it, when they do transform (decay), they become more an individual being, separate. Together they are part of a body. If one plays with that idea, all the myriad life forms of just planet earth, is this one molecule of something so big we can’t really grasp it? Could the galaxy be one small part of some vast and huge “being”?