Here me out: Earth life first put a surface around the seawater it was in. Each cell is really a bag of saline (unless you're a plant and then you have rigid walls) plus other stuff. That was encapsulated. Anyone who has kept saltwater fish knows that they only do well in a narrow range of temperatures, salinity, and so forth.
Then creatures thermoregulated, carrying the necessary temperatures for life within themselves. Slow down at night. Basking in the sun: an innovation. Feathers, then fur. Brown fat cells. All this to keep our interior seawater just so.
But what if what kickstarted life wasn't just chemistry, but the cycles applied to the chemistry? A warm little pond, a soup all of its own. New unreacted chemicals (nutrients) rain in. A bit of tide washes out the chemicals at the bottom of the entropy chain (waste). Rain in, wash out, over and over, allowing for a concentration. Dump chemicals in an unmoving tank of water, they head toward equilibrium, but have them surging in and out, you can get interesting stuff. Rain in, wash out; inhale, exhale; eat, excrete; heartbeat. All cycles. Urea cycle, Krebs cycle, glyoxylate cycle. Once you step back to see that life works as repeated cycles of chemistry, well, we probably needed cycles to get started, just as we needed chemistry and other conditions to get started. We incorporated those cycles because life is not static, it persists because it repeats.
So perhaps -- and this is just a perhaps -- not only does life need one "set" of chemistry or another to begin (maybe arsenic instead of phosphorus, hydrogen sulfide instead of water), it needs cycles, interlocking cycles. So not just a year with seasons, but day and night (tidally locked planets need not apply), and even tides (hope you have a moon) would be needed. The more cycles to piggyback upon, the more opportunities for chemistry to capture, repeat, and encapsulate those cycles, to self-perpetuate.
Just something I wonder about.