🌊 The Threshold of Leaving Home — “You Belong to the World.”

A Threshold Journey

I was nineteen when my father said it.

Not tenderly.
Not dramatically.
Simply, truthfully —
as if he were naming something he had always seen
but was finally giving language to:

“You belong to the world.”

At nineteen, I didn’t understand the magnitude of those words.
I heard freedom.
I heard possibility.
I heard a kind of blessing.

But what he was giving me was a permission slip from destiny itself.

My father named me after Tagore’s Gitanjali — “Song Offerings,” the book of poems he loved most.
I think now that he believed a child should enter the world already carrying contribution in her name.

He would tell me, inspired by Tagore,
that children are like the spring at the top of a mountain —
they come from the mountain,
but they must find their way to the ocean.

That was my first teaching in the nature of Becoming.

A spring does not cling to its shape.
A spring does not mourn its stillness.
A spring does not apologize for flowing.
It simply moves —
gathering momentum,
gathering wisdom,
gathering earth —
until it meets what it was always destined for.

But what no one tells you is this:

When the stream approaches the ocean, it hesitates.

Because meeting the ocean means losing its identity.

No longer “a stream.”
No longer defined.
No longer separate.
No longer recognizable.

That is what leaving home felt like.

A part of me longing for the ocean —
for the world, the art, the unknown —
and a part of me terrified that once I left,
I would no longer know who I was.

But my soul chose parents who set me free.
My soul chose a lineage that whispered,

Go.
Be who you were born to be.
Return only when you are ready.

My soul chose a father whose truth became my compass.

My mother, in her own quiet wisdom, once told me,
“If I held on to you, you wouldn’t be free.”
She knew I had to grow beyond the limits our culture placed on women —
and she loved me enough to let me go.
Her letting go was the soft power behind every crossing that followed.

And because of that…
I stepped into my first threshold —
the threshold of becoming a woman
the world would meet long before she met herself.

And that crossing changed everything.

Author’s Note

This moment — my father’s words — was my first initiation into the truth that identity is temporary, but Becoming is eternal. Every threshold since has carried an echo of this original blessing:
You belong to the world.
Go where your Self is calling.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

If this spoke to you, share it with someone standing at their own threshold.
I write about leadership, identity, and Human Design — where transformation becomes art and reinvention becomes remembrance.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, My Mother’s Sari, 2025