"You have to breathe in order to live, so breathing is how you get in touch with the sacred space of your heart."
– Jaden Smith, T Magazine, November 17, 2014
Just breathe. Breathe because you have to, but also because you want to. Feel the life force course through your veins. Let it envelop you and carry you away. Far away – to a mystical land where you could have been Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's kid. Because we read that interview the two Smith kids (Jaden, 16 and Willow, 14) gave to T Magazine. And after we finished, we were left with three important questions:
- Why weren't we reading about quantum physics in early adolescence?
- What exactly is the melancholiness of the ocean?
- Also, what's prana energy?
If Will and Jada were our parents, perhaps we'd have these questions answered. As it is, all we can do is dream about what it would be like to be a Smith kid and truly inhabit a world without limits, where, as Jaden put it, "Life is a meditation." But some people aren't content just dreaming, and instead let their envy overtake them. This explains why so many people have lashed out at the Smith siblings for what they consider to be the kids' pretentious and didactic tone.
Salon, for instance, called the interview "insane." The Western Australian termed it "bizarre." For Jezebel, it was "weird." Basically, most of the coverage of the interview has revolved, either implicitly or explicitly, around the question of, "Just who do these kids think they are, talking about prana energy?"
Well guess what: They may be kids, yes. And yes, they may be a little bit wordy. But you know what – they also know what they're talking about. To illustrate that, let's analyze some quotes from the interview for scientific and philosophical veracity:
Quote: "Time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that's how I know it doesn't exist." -Willow Smith
Analysis: With this quote, Willow seems to be alluding to the central idea behind Parmenides's paradox – namely, that in order to travel from point A to B, you have to travel "through an infinite series of fractions of that distance." So before you can get to B, you have to get to 1/2 B, and 1/4 B, and 1/1,056,798,234 B, and on and on to infinity. And because you can't take infinite steps, then movement, in the material world, is a fallacy. And that's basically what Willow is saying – that because motion is only a construct, so too is time.
Quote: "When babies are born, their soft spots bump. It has, like, a heartbeat in it. That's because energy is coming through their body, up and down." -Jaden Smith
Analysis: This has been one of the more widely-mocked quotes to come out of the interview, but it doesn't take much analysis to recognize that Jaden is 100 percent on the mark with this one. After all, these are facts: (1) Babies are born with soft spots on their heads. (2) These soft spots pulsate. (3) That's because blood (energy) is traveling through the baby's body, up and down. OK, so maybe Jaden's description was a little too poetic to discuss something that's biologically designed for the baby to travel out of the womb, but hey, poetic doesn't mean it's inaccurate.
So to all the Jaden/Willow detractors out there, we have just one piece of advise: Breathe. Get in touch with the sacred spirit of your heart. Because somewhere in there, between your coronary arteries, lies a deep admiration for these two remarkable kids.
