Will

by Will Smith

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said there are only two human problems: (1) knowing what you want, but not knowing how to get it; and (2) not knowing what you want.

But those first couple of months with Jada transformed me from a disbeliever to an agnostic.

Lol wut

Jason’s Lyric was Jada’s current movie. The film is a beautiful love story between Lyric, played by Jada, and Jason, played by Allen Payne. At sixty-three minutes into Jason’s Lyric, Jada has a graphic love scene that has become one of the most iconic love scenes in African American cinema. So when Jada said she was leaving her house in fifteen minutes, to take the forty-four-minute drive to my place, I pushed play on Jason’s Lyric, and Gigi started watching. Fifteen plus forty-four is fifty-nine minutes, and I trusted the comedy gods to do their part with traffic, parking, maybe a hug and kiss in the driveway. The comedic scene had been set. And boy, did the comedy gods come through. In a moment of unbelievable comedic synchronicity, Jada walked into my family room exactly sixty-three and a half minutes later to find Gigi summoning all the Jesus she could muster as Lyric and Jason roll around butt nekkid on-screen—not even socks on—outside on the grass. Jada freezes. She looks at Gigi, then to the screen. Back to Gigi. Horrified. Then to me. Back to the screen. To Gigi. To me. “Gigi, I’d like you to meet my new girlfriend, Jada,” I said, filled with so much joy I could barely stand. Gigi sits back on the couch, folds her arms, and says, “When I was young, people didn’t have to take their clothes off to make movies.” Jada plastered an uneasy smile on her face, and awkwardly hugged Gigi. “Will,” Jada said calmly, “may I speak to you in the other room, please?” “We’ll be rig...

Wtf?

Is that shit funny, or what?

No

“I may be oversteppin’ my bounds a bit here,” John went on. “But none of these execs, or producers, or businesspeople, give a shit about your family. Do not let them fuck off all of your hard work and passion. It is your responsibility to make sure these people get to leave this show with some dignity.”

Mom-Mom’s filing of the divorce papers triggered the full weight of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Daddio had taken care of us, but he had never officially paid child support, a fact that came to light upon the basic review of the paperwork. Mom-Mom was informed that with interest and penalties, Daddio owed her close to $140,000. And she wanted every single dime of her money. Under Pennsylvania law, if he refused, or couldn’t afford to pay, he could be arrested, jailed, and have his assets seized by the sheriff.

This made me the first person in the history of Pennsylvania to pay their own damn child support.

I’m pacing around our bedroom, fuming, imagining having to introduce my new son as Luigi Smith because some damn four-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink made up some shit about naming kids.

It’s my vision, but it’s not selfish because I’m doing it for everyone around me.

Lol

“Hey, man, look,” Daddio said, with an uncharacteristic delicacy. He understood where my mind was, and he knew he had to be careful. “You can’t win. You can’t fight with a kid’s mother. The kid will hate you forever.”

With that, I left Michael’s office. Michael was 100 percent behind me. Ultimately, only about 20 percent of the crew left. Michael and I ended up splitting the overages. It was a few million dollars between us, but it felt like a no-brainer.

(Note: My editor forced me, against my will, to add “arguably.”)

Witnessing my parents’ struggles branded me with the impression that financial stability was an imperative for love and family to have any chance whatsoever to thrive.

Jada remains steady, not breaking her gaze upon me. “So, you are sure that you want to put your wife out of the family Monopoly game with your children on Christmas Eve?”

Yes, dear reader, it’s obvious today.

Always obvious

Jada and I had agreed early in our marriage that we would never work at the same time. One of us would always have to be available full-time to the children. The Pursuit of Happyness was slated to begin principal photography in fall 2005. Jada’s appearance at Ozzfest was so successful that Guns N’ Roses asked her to open for them on their upcoming tour. But the tour was set smack-dab, dead center in the middle of Pursuit.

Jada turned down Guns N’ Roses.

“It doesn’t matter to you that I’m done, Daddy?” Willow said. “Well, of course it matters, baby, but you can’t be done.” “Why, Daddy? I had fun, and I’m finished.” “I get that, but you can’t be finished until you complete what you promised to do.”

My jaw nearly dislocated, dislodged, and shattered on the kitchen floor: My world-dominating, hair-whipping, future global superstar was totally bald.

In a moment of divine connection and revelation, she had reached me.

Willow was my little catcher in the rye. I leaned down, peered deeply into her eyes, and said, “I got it. I am so sorry. I see you.”

Then the truth hit me like a 90 mph fastball: Nobody gives a shit about anything except how they feel. Feeling good is the most important thing to everyone, everywhere, at all times. We are choosing our words, actions, and behaviors in order to achieve a feeling that we deem positive. There’s nothing more important than feeling how we want to feel. And people determine whether or not you love them by how well they feel you honor their feelings. This has been a precarious conundrum in most of my adult relationships. I have always been less concerned about someone’s immediate feelings than I have been about their overall well-being. People in my life have consistently complained about feeling unconsidered by me, and when left unaddressed, this has sometimes festered into their feeling unloved.

After Earth became the project that was going to rejuvenate and reconnect us.

As a result, our father-and-son honeymoon was short-lived. After Earth was an abysmal box office and critical failure. And what was worse was that Jaden took the hit. Fans and the press were absolutely vicious; they said and printed things about Jaden that I refuse to repeat. Jaden had faithfully done everything that I’d instructed him to do, and I had coached him into the worst public mauling he’d ever experienced.

But at fifteen years old, when Jaden asked about being an emancipated minor, my heart shattered. He ultimately decided against it, but it sucks when you hurt your kids.

Back then, I made the troubling conclusion that questing with empathy was an oxymoron, and you could either worry about how people feel, or you could win. But you had to pick one.

The entire place is in tears—her family, my family, everybody. All except Jada. She sat motionless, refusing to make eye contact with me.

“I don’t want to do anything tomorrow,” she said. “So you can cancel whatever you had planned.” I was dumbfounded. “OK,” I said, stifling my growing disappointment. “It’s late, we’ll just wait until tomorrow and see how you feel.”

“I’m telling you how I feel. I don’t want to do it,” Jada said. “Well, you don’t know what it is, so you can’t know if you want to do it or not.” “It’s my birthday—just cancel it!” Jada snapped. “I’ll cancel it in the morning. Just go to sleep and see how you feel,” I snapped back. “CANCEL IT NOW!” Jada shrieked. “What the hell is your problem?” I asked. “That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life!” she said.

We had concluded that no one can make a person happy. You can make a person smile; you can compose a moment that helps a person to feel good; you can deliver a joke that makes a person laugh; you can create an environment where a person feels safe. We can and must be helpful and kind and loving, but whether a person is happy or not is utterly out of your control.

hate it when people send me Instagram quotes that are supposed to be deep. They always come with a little fancy border, and the background’s always mauve, and in some woke-ass, illegible, calligraphy font—and when they truly wanna get you, they add a picture of a really, really old Asian man.

“I did a thing called ‘Vipassana.’ It’s a ten-day silent retreat—no television, no phone, no talking. It was wild. You have to do it.” “No talking for ten days? What’s it called again?” “Vipassana—it means ‘to see things as they really are.’

My entire childhood I shared a bedroom with Harry. If you drew a timeline that stretched from that day I met Melanie, when I was fourteen, all the way to my marriage today, I have only been single for a total of fifteen days. I hated being alone.

I went to our Utah house in the mountains. Totally secluded; at 8,400-foot altitude. I’d organized to have food left at the door, but no human contact. Other than a solitary morning walk, I wasn’t going to leave the house for fourteen straight days. Antoine had only done ten, so I had to beat him.

But you—if you could be master of the universe, and you could snap your fingers and have any life you wanted, what would it look like?”

I could see her point that as a child I had crafted a certain identity—that I had decided that there was a specific way that I had to be to survive and thrive in my environment. I could also see that the behavior was often in conflict with the truth of what I was actually thinking and feeling.

Essentially, a Freestanding Man is self-aware, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-confident, and utterly unswayed by people’s approval or disapproval.

“It’s just a quick video, Will,” he said. “My cousin has Down syndrome. He loves you. I promise it will be quick. The Fresh Prince is the only thing that makes him smile.” Uncle Fluffy: Will, just do the video. It’s not even for him. It’s for a kid with Down syndrome. Me: But I promised myself: This is my private time. And he can’t just start filming me without asking first. Uncle Fluffy: He was excited. He’s clearly a big fan. Fresh Prince is the only thing that makes the kid smile. Don’t be a dick. Me: I’m not being a dick. I’m trying to honor my promises to myself. I’m allowed to not do a video if I don’t want to. Is there no sacred space for myself? Uncle Fluffy: Sure, there is—your mansion, your limousine services, your penthouse suite, your private jets: All the shit we wouldn’t have if I let your newfangled “sense of self” run our lives.

The pain in this man’s eyes is burned in my memory. It brings tears even to this day. He looked at me with such disbelief—This is not Will Smith. . . . “But why not?” he said. I paused. I searched for the deepest, most honest answer. “Because I don’t want to,” I said. The man shook his head in disgust, turned, and left the gym. I knew I had done right by myself, but I hated that someone else—an innocent—had gotten caught in the cross fire of my internal war. I never made it to the cardio. I went back to my room and could not stop crying.

In essence, she told me I should be still, and I should be quiet, in order to better observe and understand the people and circumstances around me. She had watched me batter myself for so many years trying to impose my Will on the world. Her point was, if I stopped talking and thinking so much, I could see and sense the universal tides and I could align my energies to them and achieve twice as much with half as much effort. I heard an echo of Gigi’s words to me so many years before: “You know, if you stopped talking so much, maybe you could see some of those hits coming.”

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying lays out the most critical tenets to supporting and soothing the transition of a dying loved one. The first idea that jumped off the page for me was that a dying person often needs “permission to die.” The book posits that sometimes a dying person will fight and struggle to stay alive if they don’t have the sense that you are going to be OK without them. This can create horrific and painful final days. In order for our loved one to let go and die peacefully, they need to be explicitly reassured that we’re going to be OK after they are gone, that they did a great job with their life, and that we can handle it from here.

Hellos and goodbyes should be that way in our everyday lives because the reality is tomorrow is not promised. I began to embrace every hello with gratitude and to never take a goodbye for granted.

Finally, I hear my sister Ellen in the background whisper to Daddio, “Dad—you’re just looking. You don’t have anything you want to say to Will?” Daddio searches for one last piece of wisdom. One final brick. But he’s empty. He slowly shakes his head, a final surrender. “Shit, anything I ain’t told this muthafucka already, he sure ain’t gonna get it from me tonight.” We shared a final laugh, we said goodbye, and forty-five minutes later, Daddio was gone.

It’s easy to “love” somebody when they do what you want them to do, exactly how you want them to do it. But how do you behave when they step outside of your picture? How do you treat them when they hurt you? Those are the times that determine whether or not you actually love somebody.

But bravery does not mean the absence of fear. Bravery is learning to continue forward even when you’re terrified.

So why are you heli bungee jumping over the Grand Canyon? When I first heard that question out loud, I thought, It’s obvious! I’m in the wicked clutches of an anaconda of a midlife crisis. But I was live on YouTube, so I couldn’t say that.

“I’ve had an interesting relationship with fear my whole life. I’ve traversed the spectrum of fear reactions, from complete debilitation through inspiration and sometimes slipping into outright foolishness. But when the idea of heli bungee jumping over the Grand Canyon came up, I wasn’t debilitated, and I sure wasn’t inspired—all I could think was, This shit is stupid.”