What distinguishes Rumi's observation is the assumption that the light already exists within us—we are not asked to create it from nothing, but merely to recognize what's dormant. The real work, then, is not heroic self-invention but the quieter act of attention and permission, the way you might notice a coal still holding heat beneath ash. Consider someone who's spent years in a job that dulls them: Rumi suggests their vitality hasn't vanished into some unreachable distance, but waits there, patient and whole, requiring only the match-strike of a decision or encounter to flare back into being.