Brené Brown:
American researcher, storyteller, and Texan who’s spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.
The strongest people aren’t always the people who win, but the people who don’t give up when they lose.
In many ways, September feels like the busiest time of the year: The kids go back to school, work piles up after the summer’s dog days, and Thanksgiving is suddenly upon us.
Brené Brown is describing how ‘September begins an unexpectedly intense and fast-moving part of the year’:
– Children return to school.
– Work becomes busy again after the slower summer period.
– The weeks seem to pass so quickly that Thanksgiving feels as though it arrives almost immediately.
“Thanksgiving is suddenly upon us” is deliberate hyperbole:
Thanksgiving is not in September, but the intervening weeks feel compressed by busyness.
“The summer’s dog days” means the hottest, often slowest part of summer. The expression comes from the ancient association of this period with ‘Sirius’, the “Dog Star.”
✍️ Author and origin:
The quotation is by Brené Brown.
It appears in:
> “The Gifts of Imperfection” (2010)
> Guidepost 7:
“Cultivating Play and Rest:
Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth.”
The page number varies by edition.
💡 Context:
It is not an old proverb or traditional saying. ‘It is Brown’s modern observation about the ‘back-to-school and pre-holiday rush’ ‘, used appropriately in a chapter arguing that people need to value ‘rest and play’, rather than treating exhaustion and constant productivity as signs of success.
