David Strabala, MSW
I was at most six years old when I was playing a card game of War with my Dad, and I was very disappointed with the cards I had. I complained. He replied, “Why don’t you learn to play the ones you are dealt first, then maybe you will get some better ones next time.”
I think my future selves must have listened well, because Dad’s words have echoed throughout my life. When I was a journalist in my twenties, I noticed the variety of ways people played their cards during my hundreds of interviews with them.
As a clinical social worker and storyteller the last twenty-some years, I’ve seen how people play out familiar story patterns — whether fiction or non-fiction.
Now that I have completed my first feature film about synchronicity, I am more intrigued about the cards we are dealt. I’ve noticed how people's external cards (events) can line up with their internal images. Makes me wonder if synchronicity can point us to a destiny built less on war and more on discoveries of co-creation. While any story has conflict in its cards, what if we learned to play them more consciously? At least it wouldn’t be so boring, and at best, much less dangerous. Where are you in your life story? What brought you here?
Current Project:
What Is Synchronicity?: Personal stories and science meet metaphysics in the feature documentary, 'What Is Synchronicity?'
Purchase: The 90-minute feature will be available for purchase by September, 2015.
Meaningful coincidence. The experience is as old as a caveman finding food at the right place at the right time. Our words for it today? We have many, but a grunt, a shrug or a smile may do just the same.