Sunday Scribblings: Time Machine

This is the 100th prompt from Sunday Scribblings! I haven't participated in all of them. I'm not sure I've even participated in half of them. But Sunday Scribblings has become a part of my week. If I'm internet accessible at all, I will check to see what the prompt is, and try to post on it. If I've missed it because of a weekend away, I'll look during the week, and I really try to visit the blogs of quite a few participants. I always feel fascinated at the range of responses and interpretations people make on any given prompt. When I look over my archives, I find pieces of writing I'm sure I never would have done but for Sunday Scribblings, and some of them are pieces that please me, that satisfied some need at the time of writing or that helped me to articulate some idea that had never been offered a space before. Quite often, the prompt offered will have a serendipitous connection to some other facet of my life, and sometimes I've made fairly silly or tenuous connections that worked for me, but might have confused a reader who was looking to see what my words had to do with the actual prompt.

More than anything, Sunday Scribblings' prompts have operated as a time machine for me. - Offering an idea that would send me back through the days and years of my life for the time when that had most meaning to me. I've travelled back to a childhood stay in hospital; remembred dates of signifiance; pondered whether my youth was indeed misspent. I've had a chance to recall when I first felt myself to be powerful in my life; to consider the importance of writing throughout my years, from my baby days chewing on my father's fountain pen, to today's blogging-as-writing. I wrote a piece to the prompt "simple" which felt really special, as a reminder of a good weekend spent with my visiting sisters and new step-neice-to-be. I wrote a piece on "superstition" that allowed me to vent my frustration at the increasing number of (often well-intentioned) emails that threaten me with some dire consequence (mainly the loss of all my friends) if I do not pass on the message to 6, or 10 or 15 other people, containing the same warning. The prompt "Goodbyes" acted as a time machine that sent me back in search of healing, and helped me find some of what has really helped in the journey out of my woundedness at the end of my marriage. The prompt of "Fortune Cookie" gave me a way to write of the American family who have adopted me as one of their own and become such special friends to me: allowed me to travel back in time to sit in the Chinese restaurant where we'd shared a meal on my last night with them during my first visit.

This prompt, this week's suggestion that I consider what are the Time Machines in my life, has in itself allowed me to see Sunday Scribblings through this new prism. Every week, even if I do not write on the prompt, it can act as a dial to point my ruminations off into the past, noticing the places where some thought clicks with this week's word or phrase.

Megg and Laini didn't know they were constructing an aparatus of such complexity, such subtlety that, depending on the user, it could offer literally millions of permutations of meaning. They didn't know what a valuable piece of equipment they were making freely available to us.
They didn't know that their machine was magic.

Or maybe, maybe - they did!

Thank you, Megg and Laini of Sunday Scribblings.

To do some more Time Travelling, go HERE