As some of you may know, my father was a doctor. I often quote him or remember something he did or thought. He had, I admit an enormous influence on me, including my feeling that I have to justify my existence every day. He was very demanding, but loving and generous, too, and open to change. He was a family practitioner, one of the prime movers in the founding of the College of General Practice in Canada. One of its principles was that each member maintain and increase his medical knowledge annually, this, to provide some guarantee that doctors , especially country ones, keep abreast of current strides and not just slide along on what they had learned ten, twenty, thirty years before. Of course, their strength was in their holistic knowledge of the families they treated. They listened to their patients.

My father listened to people, carefully, every day. Sometimes he would comment, with rueful humour, as when he learned of third-generation incest in a family, that he must have missed that day at medical school, when the subject was taken up. (It wasn’t.) Anyway, getting to my point (slowly), because he listened to other people’s aches, pains and complaints all day he wanted good news when he came home. Just the good news, please, at the family dinner table, and a bit of humour would help. He wanted us to be well and happy. I was sent home twice from school, at recess, once with mumps and once with chicken pox, because my dad deemed me well enough to struggle gamely forth. To this day, when I go to see my doctor and he asks me how I am, I always answer brightly, “Just fine!” though I made the appointment to deal with a problem. I was expected to be well and I expect to be well. That’s probably why I had such trouble with my leg wound earlier this year. I expected to be well and was impatient with its reluctance to heal. Obviously that attitude has its limitations and hazards, but I think it has advantages, too. I am slow to admit that I have a problem and I am even slower to take a pill. I don’t call a doctor at every mishap because i don’t want to be a bother. I firmly believe that if everyone felt like that, the pressures and costs of universal medical care would go down. I suppose the doctors’ incomes would, too.

This was going to be by way of a preamble to something else I wanted to discuss, but that’s enough for now. What’s your family like?

Do they still say that? Keep It Simple,Stupid. It's still valid, in fact, it's more popular (and necessary) than ever.

There's a new bible out for the consumer challenged, to help shame them into downsizing, simplifying or - to put it in the new guru's terms - "Sparking Joy".

Marie Kondo is a young Japanese woman who speaks no English but whose books on tidying have caught on with messy, desperate North Americans who are drowning in a sea of stuff. Her first book, "The Life-Changing Magic", published in English in 2014, and the more recent "Spark Joy", with folding diagrams, have created Konverts who claim they have seen a light once darkened by mountains of possessions.

Apparently Kondo's method treats people as if they were addicts who must be shamed and trained for two lifestyle choices: "Tidying Completed" or Tidying Not Yet Completed". One must go through a once-in-a-life-time-tidying marathon: piling five categories of material possessions, assessing them and then deciding what produces joy in your body, and getting rid of what does not. KonMari (trade-marked nickname) thinks you can own as much or as little as you want, as long as everything gives you true joy. The trick is to make it stick.

That's hard, and it doesn't last.

I went through the process, though not quite as rigid, when I moved out of Toronto to live on a lake in Muskoka over 25 years ago now. (I came back 13 years ago). In order to move my worldly goods into a (winterized) cottage I downsized drastically and I wrote a book about it (Enough: Lifestyle and Financial Planning for Simpler Living, 1988). But see, it doesn't last. As long as you keep on living you keep on accumulating, like books. And the number of things that give me true joy keeps increasing, too, especially books. Still, I own a lot less than I did and I don't buy nearly as much, except books.

My book began as an article I wrote for The Globe and Mail when I moved; my reader response was instant. A lot of people told me they were going to save my article and then realized that was being counter-productive. I guess it would be okay if it gave them joy.

Anyway, here I am, surrounded by books. Is that progress?