On ending well

This line arrives inside a passage where Marcus is counting the dead: physicians who frowned over patients, astrologers who forecast the ends of others, whole crowds of the once-important now gone. Having stared at how briefly anything lasts, he does not conclude that brevity makes a thing worthless. He turns instead to the olive, which does not cling to the branch or resent the season. It ripens, drops, and in dropping gives thanks for what fed it. The instruction is not to endure the end grimly but to meet it with gratitude, and to leave a thing while it is still whole rather than clutch it into decline.

This week a Houston chef closed the daily service of a restaurant that had earned real recognition in barely two and a half years, choosing to end it as a full-service room rather than let it thin out. Late August, chef Chris Williams's restaurant in the Ion mixed-use development, has closed for daily service but will remain open for private events through the end of the year. Most of what we build has a season. The question is whether we can let it fall ripe, thanking what grew it, instead of holding on until it rots.