Take consciousness and extend it across a series of slivers. That's life the way that I regard it. If you ask me, I'd say that a single life is a consciousness centre shared by a set of slivers arranged in an entropic sequence. You can think of it as linear. You might also think of it as a line passing through a consciousness cloud. Since these are not easy things to imagine, let me offer some help.
To begin, our consciousness seems to reside at a physical location - behind and between our eyes; that's our common perception. Whether or not that is so in reality, I don't know. But for the sake of thought experimentation, I think it's a useful concept. Let's run with the notion.
All is one, and so, in a sense, there's just one life. But at the same time, we experience multiplicity. How to reconcile oneself to that? Perhaps it's like a river forming whirlpools at different locations. Each is a swirling centre within the whole. Seen like that, the ideas of oneness and multiplicity would not exclude one another.
Now take a look at a sliver. It has a centre of consciousness. That centre is part of the pattern. Let's mark it with a radio-active pixel.
Next, take that same sliver but mark a different pixel in another position. In fact, reproduce that sliver as many times as it has pixels, with each pixel radio-activated in turn. Now you have the entire set of centres of consciousness. At each centre exists as much of a life that can fit there. Consciousness expresses itself at that point to the degree that the environment about that point is able to support consciousness.
Lives run downhill. They all end. They flow according to entropy.
A life can proceed in different directions; the future's not fixed. But it can only originate from one linearity.
A life extends until the environment can no longer maintain the continuing equilibrium that supports that consciousness 'entity' - until there are no more next-step slivers that support that centre. The whirlpool then dies out.