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26 September 2026

When we are young, enough is usually somewhere ahead.

A little more money. A better house. Another position. Another journey. Another achievement to add to the list.

We keep moving because we believe the next thing will finally make us feel settled.

Then, slowly, something changes.

We begin to notice that some of the happiest moments had very little to do with what we possessed.

A conversation that went on longer than expected. An old friend appearing at the door. A quiet afternoon when there was nowhere to go. Sitting beside someone we love without needing to say anything.

Perhaps age does not necessarily make us want less.

It simply teaches us to recognise what is already enough.

We become less impressed by things that once seemed important. We begin to value time differently. A free evening can feel richer than an expensive outing. A familiar face can mean more than a room full of people.

Life does not always become smaller as we grow older.

Sometimes it becomes clearer.

And somewhere along the way, we discover that enough was never a destination.

It was a feeling we were carrying with us all along.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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25 September 2026

Most birds can fly forward.

The hummingbird apparently never received the instruction.

It can fly backwards.

Not just for a brief moment, but with remarkable control. Its unusual wing movement allows it to hover in one place, move forward, move sideways and reverse through the air.

That is already impressive.

But the hummingbird has another trick. Its wings can beat dozens of times every second, allowing it to remain almost perfectly still while feeding from a flower.

Perhaps that is why watching one can feel slightly unreal.

One moment there is an empty garden.

The next, a tiny blur appears beside a flower, hangs there for a few seconds and disappears.

No dramatic entrance. No farewell.

Just a flash of wings.

Nature has produced larger birds, faster birds and birds that travel much farther.

But the hummingbird seems to have been given its own set of rules.

Including one that says:

Forward is optional.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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25 September 2026

High in the hills of southern Albania, the town of Gjirokastër appears to rise out of the mountain itself.

Its steep streets are paved with stone. Its old houses have distinctive stone roofs, and many seem to climb the hillside one above another.

There is little softness in the architecture.

It was built for a mountainous place where houses had to withstand weather and adapt to the slope. The result is a town that feels remarkably different from many European historic centres.

Gjirokastër is sometimes called the “Stone City,” and UNESCO inscribed its historic centre as a World Heritage site in 2005. The organisation describes it as a rare example of a well-preserved Ottoman-era town, shaped by a long tradition of Balkan vernacular architecture. (whc.unesco.org)

But what stays with a visitor is not necessarily its history.

It is the feeling of walking uphill between old stone walls, looking across rooftops and wondering how many generations have walked the same streets.

Some places announce their history with monuments.

Gjirokastër seems to have built its history into every wall.

#Albania #Gjirokaster #Europe #RajatChandraSarmah

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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25 September 2026

There comes a point in life when we become less interested in explaining ourselves.

Not because we have nothing to say, but because we begin to understand that not everyone needs to understand us.

When we are younger, we often explain our choices. Why we left. Why we stayed. Why we changed our minds. Why we could not be there. We want people to know that our decisions had reasons behind them.

With time, something changes.

We learn that a person who knows us well may understand without an explanation, while someone determined to misunderstand us may not be convinced by a hundred explanations.

So we become quieter.

We choose our company a little more carefully. We stop answering every question. We stop defending every silence.

It is not indifference.

It is simply the comfort of knowing who we are.

Perhaps growing older is partly about discovering that peace does not always come from being understood by everyone.

Sometimes it comes from no longer needing to be.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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24 September 2026

There is a goat in the Alps that seems to have a very different understanding of the word “difficult.”

Give it a steep mountain and it climbs.

Give it a cliff and it climbs.

Give it a nearly vertical dam wall and, apparently, that will do nicely too.

Alpine ibex have been filmed climbing the Cingino Dam in northern Italy, sometimes reaching astonishing heights on the steep wall. They are looking for mineral salts on the surface.

The secret is in their feet.

Their hooves are split into two parts, with hard outer edges and softer inner surfaces that help them grip tiny irregularities. Researchers have also recorded ibex using careful zigzag routes while climbing steep artificial walls.

Looking at a photograph of one standing halfway up a dam, you might reasonably wonder whether somebody has forgotten to tell the goat that gravity exists.

But the ibex seems perfectly comfortable.

For us, a wall is something that keeps us out.

For an ibex, sometimes it is simply another road.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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24 September 2026

In County Clare, there is a landscape that looks almost as though the earth forgot to become green.

The Burren is a vast limestone landscape of grey pavements, cracks, stones and small patches of soil. Yet between those rocks, an astonishing variety of flowers grows, including plants associated with Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean regions.

The landscape has been shaped by people as well as nature.

Farming in the Burren has a history stretching back thousands of years. One old tradition, known as winterage, involves allowing cattle to graze the hills during winter, helping clear tougher vegetation and making room for other plants in spring.

There are also walls everywhere—built from the same limestone that covers the land.

They do not look grand.

They are simply there, dividing fields, following the contours of the ground and quietly belonging to the landscape.

Perhaps that is what makes the Burren memorable.

It does not try to impress you.

At first, you may even wonder why anyone would call such a rocky place beautiful.

Then you walk a little farther.

You notice a flower growing between two stones. You see the Atlantic beyond the bare limestone. You begin to understand that beauty does not always arrive in green.

Sometimes it comes in grey, weathered and ancient.

#Ireland #TheBurren #IrishLandscape #RajatChandraSarmah

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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24 September 2026

There are places we leave behind but somehow never really leave.

It may be a house where we spent our childhood, a school corridor, a railway platform, or simply a road we walked every day without giving it much thought.

Years later, something brings it back.

A smell. A song. The sound of rain.

And suddenly we are there again.

I sometimes think memory does not preserve places exactly as they were. It keeps the feeling of them. The light through a particular window. Someone calling our name from another room. The sound of a gate opening. An afternoon that seemed ordinary at the time.

Perhaps that is why photographs can sometimes feel strangely incomplete.

They show us what a place looked like.

Memory reminds us what it felt like.

As the years pass, we collect many such places without realising it. Some are far away. Some no longer exist. Some have changed beyond recognition.

But somewhere inside us, they remain just as we first knew them.

Not as addresses.

As pieces of our own story.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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23 September 2026

There are animals that collect things because they need them.

And then there are octopuses.

The veined octopus, a small creature found in tropical waters, has been observed carrying coconut shells across the seabed.

At first, it may look rather comical. An octopus picks up a half coconut shell, carries it along, and eventually uses it as a kind of portable shelter.

But scientists noticed something interesting.

The animal was not simply hiding under a shell that happened to be nearby. It was carrying the shell with it, sometimes over considerable distances, apparently keeping it for later use.

That behaviour became famous because it was one of the early documented examples of an animal transporting an object for future use.

Imagine that.

A creature with no pockets, no house and no hands in the human sense, carrying its own little piece of furniture across the ocean floor.

Perhaps the sea has more comedians than we realise.

And the octopus, quietly walking sideways with a coconut shell under its arm, may be one of them.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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23 September 2026

Deep inside the forests of Guyana, far from the country’s coastal towns, the land suddenly breaks open.

Water falls from a sandstone plateau in a single enormous drop.

This is Kaieteur Falls.

At about 226 metres, Kaieteur is one of the world’s great single-drop waterfalls. What makes it particularly striking is not only its height but its setting. There are no rows of hotels around it, no busy promenade and no city growing towards it.

The waterfall stands within the vast rainforest of Kaieteur National Park.

The forest around it is home to remarkable plants and animals, including the tiny golden rocket frog, which lives among the giant bromeliads growing on the plateau.

There is also something unusual about the way Kaieteur enters the imagination.

You do not first see a famous landmark and then discover the forest around it.

You travel through the forest and eventually encounter something far larger than you expected.

Perhaps that is why the waterfall has such a strong presence in Guyana’s identity.

It is not merely a beautiful place to visit.

It is a reminder of how much of the country remains wild, green and wonderfully difficult to describe in a photograph.

#Guyana #KaieteurFalls #SouthAmerica #RajatChandraSarmah

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com

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23 September 2026

Some people remain in our lives long after we have stopped speaking to them.

Not because we deliberately hold on to them. They simply appear now and then.

A song brings back a face. A familiar smell takes us to an old house. We pass a street we have not seen for years and suddenly remember who used to walk beside us there.

It is strange how memory works.

We may forget what someone told us last month, yet remember a sentence spoken twenty years ago. We may forget the details of an entire afternoon but remember the way somebody laughed.

Perhaps people leave us in smaller ways than we realise.

A habit we picked up from them. A phrase we still use. A way of looking at the world. Even a kindness we received and later passed on to someone else without thinking about where it began.

That may be one of the quietest forms of permanence.

We do not always remember people by keeping their photographs.

Sometimes we remember them simply by becoming, in some small way, the person they once helped us to be.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com