Water, Snow, Water: Constructive Living for Mental Health

Decades after founding the philosophy known as Constructive Living—an “educational method of approaching life realistically and thoughtfully”—Reynolds rehashes his Westernized interpretation of Japanese strategies (specifically Morita Therapy and Naikan practice) for a healthy mental life. In this brief volume, interviews and testimonies from the past few years are combined with an extended diatribe against “insight-oriented traditional Western therapy” (which Reynolds views as egotistical, potentially harmful, and oftentimes little more than an excuse to avoid putting any effort into changing oneself). The author rejects the pursuits of happiness and comfort as worthwhile or achievable goals, and sees exploring past psychological trauma as a wasteful and undesirable inversion of the practice of gratitude. Instead, Reynolds advocates for a behavior-based “meaningful realism.” In order to guide readers toward that, the final section of the book is full of “assignments,” ranging from the practical (“Find something broken and fix it”) to the bizarre (he suggests trying, for a period of time, to limit your speech patterns to mimic the opening four sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth). His advice is certainly intriguing, but his presentation can feel muddled. Those interested in Constructive Living would do well to revisit Reynolds’s earlier works. (Aug.)