Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done.

The line describes a doorway between two states of mind. While we are working, we live in tension: the effort, the worry about whether it will turn out well, the pull of everything still undone. Once the work is finished, a different quiet arrives, and the finished thing simply is. The quote suggests that this peace is not a reward we wait for passively. It is something we can walk into on purpose, by letting the doing end.

It echoes an old devotional habit, found in many religious traditions, of closing the day with a kind of release. The Sabbath, the evening prayer and the examination of the day all say that effort has a proper end and that rest is part of the work. The line is usually credited to Julia Louis Woodruff, a nineteenth-century American writer, though I can't point to a reliably documented original source, so the attribution is best held loosely.

Today, this might mean ending a workday with a small ritual. You could write down what you actually completed, close the laptop and say, "That's enough for today." Then, when your mind drifts back to unfinished tasks, you can remind yourself that this part is done and let it stay done.