The writer exclaims, even if not explicitly, what she means by moment of being. She provides examples of this moments and contrasts them with moment of what she calls "non-being". ...moments of nonbeing appear to be that the individual is not consciously aware of even as she experiences them. She knows that people perform routine and tasks such as walking and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is "non lived consciously" but instead is embedded in " a kind of non descript cotton wood".
It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary that the other. Instead it is the intensity of feeling. One's consciousness of the experience that separates the two moments. A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wool for one person, but for Virginia Woolf the experience is very vivid. Virginia Woolf asserts that these moments of being, this flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life, and that we "I mean all human being - are connected with this; that the whole word is a work of art (idea taken from the Aesthetic movement); that we are parts of the work of art". Virginia Woolf says " We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself" thus for Virginia Woolf