Rumi was a 13th century Persian Sufi mystic. The line appears in the Masnavi, his sprawling 25,000-couplet spiritual epic, and has since passed through a thousand Instagram captions on its way to becoming unrecognizable. Most English versions are downstream of Coleman Barks, whose translations are beautiful and occasionally more Barks than Rumi. The core idea survives the journey.

Rumi is not celebrating suffering. There is a long, lazy tradition of reading this line as an endorsement of pain as growth, which turns it into exactly the kind of aphorism Sufism was designed to dismantle. What he is describing is structural. When something in you breaks, a gap opens. That gap is not good, but it is an aperture. Light can get in because the surface is no longer sealed.

A cat who has been injured, abandoned, or mishandled arrives differently to the next human. Not closed, not open, but precisely calibrated. It watches. It waits longer before purring. And when it does purr, it means it. The wound does not become sacred. It becomes teacher. The difference is everything.