Jamocha Tapioca Pudding from Jamaica

What is beauty? A word. An idea. Mixing Debussy and Grand Master Flash over one another, a dove on a branch outside more concerned about keeping warm than keeping the beat. Does it ever seem odd to you that we'd give atmospheric phenomena personal names?

Young people today, with relatively high unemployment, have a world of possibilities ahead of them. Someone coined the phrase that it's easier to get into Harvard than to get a job. Yet, what's a job? Painting eyes on a plastic doll to be shipped to the other side of the world for holiday gift-giving? Cooking and mashing beans to put inside a rolled-up tortilla? Looking at photos and deciding how to set the fashion industry abuzz with your new accessory arrangement? Designing software applications for people to socialise online?

Friends of mine, from Frances to Estella, from Charline to Gary, use their waking hours for socialising, being productive the way they want to be known, some in conventional jobs and some not.

We are beautiful. We have jobs: we are ourselves. We define ourselves by how we act and react.

When we are raised to believe that working and consuming are our primary purposes for being, we set ourselves up for disappointment when those tasks are nearly impossible to achieve. A new friend of mine, Earle B., has lived a long, happy life not by defining who he is by what he consumes but by being there to support others who search for who they are to be.

Of course, we want to eat. We want to have safety and shelter. We are fascinated by new colours and sounds. We are driven to increase our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others in a social environment.

A whole generation experiencing unemployment levels of the Great Depression. An experiment at the ready. A chance to redefine the goals of our ecumenopolis. Someone said we can't just start over, we have too much invested in the current system. I wonder...

I fall in love with everyone I meet. I see the life within every person just wanting to scream and shout and enjoy life to the fullest, life a definition with no clear definition. In viewing that reaching out for life, I see what life has been for every person. History that will rarely find its way into the history books.

I know that life is not fair. Life rarely gives us a treat for very long, with pits inside peaches and sunburns in tropical paradises. But we know that already, unless we get carried away from our balanced view of life. Perspective makes us speculate and listen to speculators selling spectacular spectacles. Placebo pills that'll cure every ill. Instant gratification consumables that'll last forever. Blah, blah, blah. Blah. Bland when consumed over and over for too long, right?

Can we reset our pace to enjoy the pastoral life? Can the pastoral life give food, safety, shelter and sufficient enjoyment to seven billion of us?

In this moment, this break from the recent past of increased consumption, can we think outside this box, this internetworked world, and find viable solutions that cut off the tops and bottoms of the highs and lows of economic boom and bust cycles? Okay, look, I know we don't live in a fantasy world where leprechauns have pots of golds hidden at the end of every passing thunderstorm that'll get us out of this economic slump, international stimulus fund efforts to the contrary. But we can reset our expectations, can we not?

I am the children of migrants. My family has migrated from one place to another for generations, never settling down on one plot of land for very long. I have read about, researched and watched the effects of migration on our ecumenopolis. We call it world history, do we not? We are a wandering people, our species producing too many offspring to take care of the same place over and over so we tend to spread out.

Our numbers increase. Our population grows bigger. Older people live longer and younger people die less frequently. Prosperity has brought us medical marvels and clean drinking water in many places.

In our grasp is the definition of what success means to the generation that's coming into its own, just behind mine. My generation, the Me generation, the backside of the baby boomers, holds the key to the secret to life hidden in a box. We unlocked and have looked inside the box, slowly comprehending the meaning of life, our views vastly transformed by the discovery of success that transcends material wealth. We know we are the keepers of ourselves a thousand generations from now. We want to hold the key a bit longer because the power of knowledge is too vast, we think, to give to others. But time marches on. We will give the key to the keepers of ourselves 999 generations from now.

My sister and I talked on the phone last night. We tried to recall our views of life in the early 1980s when we were stepping out from our protected secondary school years into the world of relatively high unemployment in a prosperous capitalist-market based society. My sister worked at McDonald's. I worked at Montgomery Ward. We both attended university. We remember being told that we should be thankful we had jobs in the 1981/1982 economic slump, with teachers having to work at McDonald's and PhDs pumping gas once again.

What is beauty? It's Rihanna and Taylor Swift singing a duet in a movie starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Beauty is musical, its rhythm set to our heartbeats and our thought patterns. We don't need jobs to be beautiful. We let our beauty shine and our lives unfold as if by magic, revealing ways to prosper we'd never imagined.

How do we emulate the pastoral life of balance with the land on which we live, seasonal, cyclical, sprinkling manure to grow food, fallowing one field while increasing the productivity of another, sharing the harvest effectively and fairly, migrants feeding migrants, taking turns tending the soil, generation-to-generation and intergenerational, knowing we'll always have those who think they live in a novel like Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies, greed a matter of degrees, sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold, and yes, can you believe it, sometimes just right?

We listen to ourselves. We see the beauty within and let it out. We let ourselves fall in love with each other's beauty. We see we live on the only planet we've got right now, a giant pastoral farm, if you will. We can't trade it in for a new model, or move wholescale to a new one. We see our imperfections and lean on each other during lean times. We share our flats with friends out of work, and when we're out of work we help clean and cook for our friends whose flats we share. We redefine prosperity and remember that truth is beauty. And then we go from there.